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+[
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-1",
+    "title": "Greek, Middle Age and Modern Worldviews",
+    "date": "1901",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19010107c01.html",
+    "book_title": "Philosophy, History and Literature",
+    "content": "Aristotle, whom the great medieval poet Dante called the master of those who know, spoke the following beautiful words about the fact that man cannot stop at what his senses tell him about nature and about himself: \"All men naturally desire knowledge; a sign of this is their love for the senses, which they love for their own sake, even apart from their usefulness; especially those of the face. Not only for the sake of action, but also without such intention, they prefer sight, so to speak, to everything else, because this sense brings us the most knowledge of all and reveals many qualities of things. All animals live in their mental images and have but little experience; the human race, on the other hand, lives also in art and in rational thought.\" And Hegel especially emphasized the seemingly self-evident, yet highly important sentence: \"Thinking first makes the soul, with which the animal is also endowed, a spirit.\" Man cannot but submit to himself numerous questions about the world and about himself. The answers that he gives himself, through his thinking, to these questions, make up the \"world and life views\". Angelus Silesius, a German thinker of the 17th century, aptly said that the rose blossoms simply because it blossoms; it does not ask why it blossoms. Man cannot live like that. He must ask himself what reason the world and he himself have. In the first place, man naturally puts his thinking at the service of practical life. He makes tools, machines and devices with the help of thinking, by which he can satisfy his needs in a more perfect way than is possible for an animal. But in the second place he wants to achieve something by his thinking which has nothing to do with practical utility; he wants to enlighten himself about things, he wants to recognize how the facts which he encounters in life are connected. The first mental images that man forms about the connection of things are the religious ones. He thinks to himself that the events in nature are caused by beings similar to himself. He just imagines these beings to be more powerful than himself. Man creates gods in his own image. As he works, so he imagines the world as a work of the gods. Gradually, however, scientific views grow out of the religious ones. Man learns to observe nature and its forces. He can no longer be content with imagining these forces as if they were similar to human forces. He no longer creates a God in his own image, but he forms thoughts about the connection of the world phenomena according to scientific observation provides him. Therefore a thinking world view arises within the occidental culture in the time in which the natural science has come to a certain height. Ancient Greeks were natural the first scientists. They handed down to us a world view which no longer depended on religious mental images. Thales, the first great thinker, of whom Aristotle tells us, was an important natural scientist for his time. He had already been able to predict the solar eclipse that occurred on May 28, 585 B.C., when the Median and Lydian armies were facing each other at the Halys River. Also his contemporary Anaximander was a great astronomer. If in our time the cultivation of the \"world and life view\", which is taught as philosophy at our universities, does not enjoy any special reputation, but is rather considered as a one-sided and for life dispensable school scholarship, then this stems from the fact that the philosophers of the present time have mostly lost the right connection with the individual sciences. Whoever wants to build up a \"world and life view\" cannot stop at a single science. He must assimilate all the knowledge of his time, everything we know about the development of nature and culture. All other sciences are tools for the philosopher. Today, however, it is difficult to form a comprehensive \"world and life view\" in view of the great amount of knowledge that has gradually become available. Thus it happens that the teachers of the world- and life-view often deal with questions which do not arise from a true need of man, but which are presented to them by their one-sided thinking adhering to certain traditions. A true \"world- and life-view\" must deal with questions which cannot be answered in any single science. For every single science has to do with a certain area of nature or of human life. The \"world- and life-view\" must look for a coherence of thoughts in what all individual sciences offer us in terms of knowledge. The individual science can also not be everyone's thing. On the other hand, the \"world and life view\" is of interest to all people. Not everyone can develop it, because not everyone can look around in all sciences. But as it requires innumerable knowledge to bring a table into being, which not everyone who needs a table can acquire, so it requires also for the development of a \"world view\" a comprehensive equipment, which cannot be available to everyone. Anyone can use a table, but only those who have learned to do so can make one. Everybody is interested in world- and life-view; only those can and should build up and teach it, who can get the tools for it from all single sciences. The sciences are only the tools of the world and life views. Kant posed the basic questions that generate in man the need for a worldview as follows: \"What can I know? What shall I do? What may I hope?\" Goethe expressed the matter more briefly and significantly by saying, \"If I know my relation to myself and to the external world, I call it truth.\" In fact, man wants to achieve nothing else through a world and life view than an insight into the meaning of his own existence and how he is related to the nature that is outside of him. The oldest Greek thinkers, so Aristotle tells us, considered the material beginnings to be the sole ones of all. That, from which all things consist, from which everything originates and into which everything finally passes away again: they thought about that. In the moist earth the seeds of the living beings develop. Thales was an islander. He saw how infinite life develops in the sea. The thought was obvious that the water is the original material from which all things develop. Thus it came that the first Greek thinker declared water to be the basis of all things. From water, he said, everything originates, and in water everything changes. Anaximander came one step further. He no longer trusted the senses as much as Thales. One can see the water. But everything what one can see changes into other. This is how Anaximander thought. The water can become solid by freezing; it can become vaporous by evaporation. Under steam and air the ancients thought the same. Likewise they called everything solid earth. The solid water, the earth, can change itself into liquid, this into air, said itself accordingly Anaximander, No certain substance is therefore something lasting. Therefore he did not look for the original cause in a certain substance, but in the indeterminate one. Anaximenes then again assumed a certain original substance, namely the air. He says: \"As our soul, which is air, holds us together, so breath and air embrace the whole world.\" A much higher stage of the world view stepped Heraclitus. Above all, the eternal change of all things imposed itself on him. Nothing remains, everything changes. Only our senses deceive us when they tell us that something remains. I cannot get into the same river twice. Because only apparently it is the same river, into which I step the second time. The water, of which the river consists, has become a completely different one. And so it is with all things. The tree of today is not the tree of yesterday. Other juices have moved into it; much of what was still in it yesterday has been excreted in the meantime. In the saying: \"Everything flows\", Heraclitus therefore sums up his conviction. Therefore the most restless element, the fire, becomes for him the image of all coming into being and passing away. Empedocles of Agrigento started from completely different points of view. His predecessors had searched for a single original substance. He let four primeval substances be considered as synonymous next to each other. Earth, water, air, fire exist from the beginning next to each other. None of these substances can change into the other. They can mix themselves only in the most different way. And by their mixture all the different things in the nature originate. Empedocles therefore no longer believes that a thing really comes into being and perishes. He believes that something appears to come into being when, for example, water and fire mix; and he believes that the same thing appears to pass away again when water and fire separate again. Aristotle tells us of Empedocles: \"His four beginnings, according to him, are always to persist, to be without coming into being, and to combine in various proportions into one object or from it.\" Empedocles assumes forces that prevail between his four substances. Two or more substances combine when there is an attractive force between them; they separate when there is a repulsive force between them. These attractive and repulsive forces can, according to the conviction of Empedocles, not only build up the inanimate nature from the four substances, but also the whole realm of the living. He imagines that naturally, through the forces, animal and vegetable bodies come into being. And because there is no intelligible intelligence guiding this process, there is a colorful mixture of functional and non-functional living forms. Only the functional ones can exist; the non-functional ones must perish of their own accord. This thought of Empedocles is already similar to that of Darwin of the \"struggle for existence\". Darwin also imagines that in nature purposeful and inexpedient arise and the world appears as a purposeful one only because in the \"struggle for existence\" the inexpedient is continuously defeated, thus must perish. Anaxagoras, the contemporary of Empedocles, did not believe, like the latter, to be able to explain the purposeful order of the world from the mere working of mechanical natural forces. He assumed that a spiritual being, a general world understanding gives to the things their existence and their order. He imagined that everything consisted of smallest parts, the so-called homeomerisms, which all have different properties among themselves. The general world understanding puts these original parts together that they result in purposeful things and, in the whole, a harmoniously arranged world building. Because he put a general world understanding in the place of the old people gods, Anaxagoras was accused of denial of God in Athens and had to flee to Lampsakus. In Athens, where he had gone from Klazomenae, he was in relations with Pericles, Euripides and Themistocles. The smallest parts, the homoeomeries, or seeds of all things, which Anaxagoras assumed, he imagined to be quite different from each other. In place of these smallest parts Democritus put such, which differed by nothing else than by size, shape, position and arrangement in space. In all other qualities the smallest components of the things, the atoms, should be equal to each other. What really happens in nature, according to this atomistic conviction, can be nothing else than that the position and arrangement of the smallest parts of the body change. If a body changes its color, then in reality the arrangement of its atoms has changed. Except the empty space and the atoms filling it, there is nothing in the world. There is no power which gives the atoms their order. These are in perpetual motion. Some move slower, others faster. The faster ones must come into contact with the slower ones. Through this, bodies clump together. So nothing comes into being by a mind in the world or by a general reason, but by blind natural necessity, which can also be called coincidence. It is explicable from these convictions that the followers of Democritus led a violent fight against the old people-gods. They were decided deniers of God or atheists. One must see in them the forerunners of the materialistic world views of later centuries. Parmenides and his followers tried to approach the world phenomena from a completely different side than the thinkers mentioned so far. They assumed that our senses cannot provide us with a faithful, true picture of the world. Heraclitus drew the conclusion from the fact that everything changes eternally, that there is nothing permanent, but that the eternal flow of all things corresponds to the true being. Parmenides said exactly the other way round: because in the outside world everything changes, because here eternally everything comes into being and passes away, therefore we cannot win the true, the lasting by observation of the outside world. We have to understand what this outer world presents to us as appearance and can only gain the eternal, the lasting through thinking itself. The outer world is a deception of the senses, a dream, which is something completely different from what the senses make us believe. What this dream really is, what remains eternally the same, we cannot gain by observing the outside world, that reveals itself to us through thinking. In the outside world there is multiplicity and diversity; in thinking the Eternal-One reveals itself to us, which does not change, which always remains the same. Thus Parmenides expresses himself in his teaching poem \"On Nature\". So we are dealing with a world view which does not want to get the truth from the things themselves, but which tries to spin the original reason of the world out of thinking. If one wants to make clear from which basic feeling such a world view originates, then one must keep in mind that often thinking must indeed interpret, explain the perceptions of the senses in the right way, in order to come to a satisfying thought. If we hold a stick in the water, it appears broken to the eye. Thought must look for the reasons why the stick appears broken. So we get a satisfactory mental image of this appearance only by our thinking explaining the perception. If we look at the starry sky only with our senses, we cannot form any other mental image than the one that the earth stands in the center of the world and that the sun, the moon and all the stars move around it. Only by thinking we gain another mental image. In this case even the thinking gives us a completely different picture than the sensual perception. So one can say that the senses deceive us in a certain respect. But the world view of Parmenides and his followers is a one-sided exaggeration of this fact. For as perception supplies us with certain appearances which deceive us, so it supplies us again with other facts by which we can correct the deception. Copernicus did not come to his view of the movement of the celestial bodies by spinning it out of mere thinking, but by bringing one perception into harmony with others. In contrast to the view of Parmenides stands another older world view. It does not proceed to regard the connections in the external world as a deception, but it wants to lead exactly by a deeper observation of this external world to the realization that in the world everything is based on a great harmony, that in all things measure and number exist. This view is that of the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras lived in the 6th century B.C. Aristotle tells of the Pythagoreans that they turned to mathematics at the same time as the thinkers mentioned above and even before them. \"They first continued this and, being completely absorbed in it, they considered the beginnings in it also to be the beginnings of all things. Since in mathematics the numbers are by nature the first, and since they believed to see in the numbers much similarity with the things and the becoming, and indeed in the numbers more than in the fire, the earth and the water, so they regarded one property of the numbers as the justice, another as the soul and the spirit, again another as the time, and so on for all the rest. They further found in the numbers the properties and the relations of harmony, and thus everything else seemed to be, according to its whole nature, the image of the numbers, and the numbers the first in nature.\" Whoever knows how to appreciate the importance which measure and number have in nature, will not find it surprising that such a world view as the Pythagorean one could arise. If a string of certain length is struck, a certain tone is produced. If the string is shortened in certain numerical ratios, then always other tones are produced. One can express the pitch by numerical ratios. Physics also expresses colors in numerical ratios. When two bodies combine to form a substance, this always happens in such a way that the weights of one body, which can be expressed by numbers, combine with those of the other body. Such examples of which role number and measure play in nature can be cited innumerable. The Pythagorean worldview expresses this fact in a one-sided way by saying: Measure and number are the origin of all things. In all world views discussed so far a question slumbers. It is nowhere clearly expressed in them, because the thinkers obviously thought that it answers itself with the other questions they asked. It is the question of the relation of man to the world. If Thales thinks all things originated from water, he also thinks man originated from the same source. Heraclitus was of the opinion that man swims along with all others in the eternal river of things; and Anaxagoras thought of man as being built up by his general understanding of the world from his original particles, just as the atomists imagined that chance had also put man together from the atoms. In Empedocles something of the question appears first: What is the relation between man and the rest of nature? How can he recognize the things? How is it possible for him to make mental images of that what is nevertheless outside of him? Empedocles gave the answer: Like can be recognized only by like. - Because man consists of the same substances and forces as the rest of nature, therefore he can also recognize them. In a completely different way a number of thinkers tackled this question, who are usually unrecognized. They are the Sophists, whose most important personality is Protagoras of Abdera. They are usually considered as people who played a superficial game with thinking, a vain disputation, and who lacked all seriousness for the investigation of truth. The way in which the reactionary comedy poet Aristophanes ridiculed them in his dramas contributed a great deal to the opinion that was formed about the Sophists. It may be that individual sophists exaggerated the art of disputation, it may also be that among them there were some who were only concerned with splitting hairs and with a foppish appearance: but this does not apply to the most important of them, for there were men among them who distinguished themselves by a comprehensive knowledge in the most diverse fields. Of Protagoras this must be particularly emphasized, but also of Gorgias we know that he was an outstanding politician, and of Prodicus his pupil Socrates himself boasts that he was an excellent scholar, who was particularly concerned with the ennoblement of language among his pupils. Protagoras expresses his basic view in the sentence: \"Man is the measure of all things, of the existing that they are, of the non-existing that they are not. What can this sentence mean? One can say like Parmenides: our senses deceive us. And one could go even further than this and say: perhaps our thinking also deceives us. Protagoras would answer: what is it to a man whether the world is different from him than he perceives and thinks it. Does he then imagine the world for someone else and not for himself? May it be for another being as always: he has not to worry about it. His mental images should serve only him; he should find his way in the world with their help. Man cannot want any other mental images of the world than those that serve him. Whatever is in the world: if man does not perceive it, he cannot care about it. For him there is what he perceives; and it is not there for him what he does not perceive. But this means: man measures things with the measure that his senses and his reason give him. Protagoras gives man a firm position and security in the world through his view. He frees him from innumerable anxious questions, which he raises only because he does not dare to judge things by himself. One may say that through sophistry man is moved into the center of the world view. The fact that this happened at the time of Protagoras is connected with the development of the public conditions in Greece. The social structure of the Greek state associations had loosened. This found its most significant expression in the Peloponnesian Wars, 431-404 BC. Previously, the individual was firmly enclosed in the social context; the community and tradition gave him the standard for all his actions and thoughts. The individual personality had value and meaning only as a member of a whole. Under such conditions it would have been impossible to ask the question: What is the individual worth? The Sophistik is a tremendous progress after the Greek Enlightenment to. Man could now think of arranging his life according to his reason. The sophists went around the country as teachers of virtue. If one wants to teach virtue, one must be convinced that the traditional moral views are not decisive, but that man can recognize virtue through his own reflection. Socrates also lived in such mental images of virtue. He must be regarded as a disciple of Sophism. Little is known about him. The reports about what he taught are doubtful. What is clear, however, is that he was primarily a teacher of virtue, like the Sophists. And it is also certain that he was ravishing in the way he taught. His teaching consisted in the fact that in conversation he sought to draw out of the listener himself what he recognized as the right thing to do. The expression \"spiritual midwifery\" is well known in relation to his teachings. He did not want to bring anything into the mind of the student from outside. He was of the opinion that the truth was located in every human being and that one only had to provide help so that this truth would come to light. If we consider this, we can see that Socrates helped reason to its highest right in every single human being. He always brought the student to the point where he could form the right concept of a thing. He started from the experiences of everyday life. One can consider, for example, what virtue is for the craftsman, what virtue is for the merchant, what virtue is for the scholar. One will find that all these different kinds of virtuous life have something in common. This common feature is precisely the concept of virtue. If one proceeds with one's thinking in this way, one follows the so-called inductive procedure. One collects the individual experiences in order to obtain a concept of a thing. When you have this concept, you can define the thing. One has the definition of the thing. A mammal is a living thing with a spine that gives birth to living young. This is the definition of the mammal. It gives the characteristic - giving birth to living young - which is common to all mammals. Thus Socrates acted as a teacher of sharp, clear thinking. This is his great merit. - The Roman orator Cicero said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven to earth. By this is meant that he made his observations especially about man himself. How man should live, that was above all close to his heart. That is why we see in Greece that those who strive for a world view always ask what moral goals man should set for himself. This is immediately apparent in the next successors of Socrates. The Cynics, whose most important personality is Diogenes of Sinope, deal with the question of a natural life. How should man live so that his life does not contradict what nature has placed in him in terms of dispositions and abilities? The Cynics wanted to remove everything artificial and unnatural from life. That above all the greatest simplicity appeared to them as the best, is explicable. Natural is what is a common need of all people. The proletarian came into his own in this conception of life. One can therefore imagine that the so-called higher classes did not like this philosophy very much. What the Cynics demanded did not agree with the artificially created needs. While originally the name Cynics came only from the educational institution - Kynosarges - where the Cynics gave lessons, later it got a contemptuous connotation. Besides the Cynics, the Cyrenaics and the Megarics were active. They, too, were primarily concerned with practical life. The Cyrenaics sought to help lust to its rights. Pleasure corresponds to the nature of man. Virtue cannot consist in eradicating lust within oneself, but in not making oneself a slave to lust. He who strives for pleasure, but always in such a way that he remains master of his pleasures, is virtuous. Only he who becomes the slave of his passions is virtuous. The Megarics held on to Socrates' statement that virtue is teachable, that therefore the perfection of thought must also make one more virtuous. The most important representative of the megaric doctrine is Euclides. To him the good was an outflow of the highest wisdom. Therefore, he was primarily concerned with the attainment of wisdom. And from this estimation of wisdom must have arisen to him the thought that wisdom itself is the original source of the world. If - so he thought - the human being rises by his thinking to concepts, he rises at the same time to the origins of the things. With Euclid the world view takes on a decidedly idealistic coloration. One must imagine the mental image of Euclid like this: There are many lions. The substances of which these consist do not remain together. The single lion arises and passes away. It takes up substances from the outside world and gives them back to it. That what I perceive with the senses, that is the material. What is sensually perceptible at the things, arises therefore and passes away. Nevertheless, a lion which has lived a hundred years ago has something in common with a lion which lives today. It cannot be the substances. It can be only the concept, the idea of the lion which I grasp by my thinking. The lion of today and the lion of a hundred years ago are built according to the same idea. The sensual passes away; the idea remains. The ideas embody themselves in the sense world always anew. A pupil of Euclides was Plato. He made his teacher's mental image of the eternity of the ideas his basic conviction. The sense world has only a subordinate value for him. The true things are the ideas. He who looks merely at the things of the sense world has only a simulacrum, a mirage of the true world. Plato's conviction is sharply expressed in the following words: The things of this world, which we perceive with the senses, have no true being; they do not remain. One can just as well call their whole being a non-being. Consequently, he who strives for the true cannot be content with the things of the sense world. For the true can only come from where the abiding is. If one limits oneself to the sensual perception, one resembles a man who sits bound in a dark cave, so that he cannot even turn his head, and who sees nothing but, by the light of a lamp burning behind him, the shadow images of the things behind him and also his own shadow. The ideas are to be compared with the real, true things, and the shadows with the things of the sense world. Even of himself, he who confines himself to the sense world recognizes only a shadow. The tree that I see, the scent of flowers that I breathe: they are only shadows. Only when I raise myself by my thinking to the idea of the tree, I have that which is truly lasting and not a transient mirage of the tree. One must now raise the question: how does Plato think of the relation of his world of ideas to the conceptions of God of the Greeks? This relation can by no means be determined with perfect clarity from Plato's writings. He repeatedly speaks of extra-worldly gods. But one can be of the opinion that he wanted to lean with such sayings merely on the Greek folk religion; and one will not err if one understands his designations of gods only as figurative clarifications. What Plato himself conceives as deity, that is a first moving cause of the world. One must imagine, in the sense of Plato, that the world consists of the ideas and the prime matter. The ideas embody themselves in the prime matter continuously. And the impetus for this embodiment is given by God, as the primordial cause of all movement. God is for Plato at the same time the good. This gives the world a great unified purpose. The good moves all being and happening. The highest world laws thus represent a moral world order. Plato wrote down his worldview in conversational form. His form of representation formed an object of admiration within the occidental culture development in the whole subsequent time. - Plato came from a noble family in Athens. From reports we know that he was a head inclined to rapture. He became the most faithful and understanding student of Socrates, attached to the master with unconditional veneration. After the execution of his teacher he went to Megara to Euclides. Later he undertook great journeys to Cyrene, Egypt, Great Greece - i.e. southern Italy - and Sicily. In 389 B.C. he returned to Athens. However, he made a second and third trip to Sicily. After returning from his first Sicilian journey, he founded his school in Athens, from which many of the important men of that time emerged. In Plato's writings one can observe a gradual change of outlook. He adopts mental images that he finds in others. In his first writings he stands entirely on the standpoint he formed as a student of Socrates. Later, Euclides had a strong influence on him, and during his stay in Sicily, he became acquainted with the Pythagoreans. In Egypt, he appropriated various Oriental thoughts. Thus it comes that his world view does not appear in his writings in such a way that it is like from a cast. He later incorporates mental images that he finds into his original views. We may count among these his doctrine of transmigration of souls. The soul already exists before the body. Yes, its embodiment, that is, its connection with matter, is regarded as a kind of punishment which it has to suffer for a guilt contracted in the pre-worldly being. But the soul embodies itself not only once, but repeatedly. Plato brings this view together with the general justice of the world. If everything were to end with one life, the good would be at a disadvantage compared to the bad. Rather, the evil committed by the soul in one life must be atoned for in another. Only when all guilt has found its expiation in the different lives, the soul returns to the realm of ideas from which it originated. In its connection with the body, the soul of man does not form a unity. It breaks down into three partial souls. The lowest soul is that of the sensual life; it has to worry about the nourishing and reproduction instinct. Plato calls the middle soul the willpower in man. Personal courage, bravery is based on it. And the highest soul is the purely spiritual one. It has to take care of the highest knowledge. It is native to the realm of ideas. It is the real immortal part of the human soul. Plato relates his immortality thoughts to the mental image of Socrates that teaching consists only in a kind of midwifery. If this is so, then all the thoughts which are awakened in man must already lie in him. They lie in him, because he had them also already before his birth, since also the soul already existed. So he remembers in life only those thoughts which were already inherent in him before his birth. With Plato's soul doctrine his view of the state is connected again. Also the state is the embodiment of an idea. And it is such an embodiment in the image of human nature, if it is perfect. The individual soul forces are represented in the state by the different estates. The highest soul is represented by the rulers, the middle soul by the guards, who are there for the defense, and the lowest soul by the craftsmen. The Platonic state is a communist state, but with a strictly aristocratic division of the estates. For the two upper estates Plato recommends marriage and possessing no property. Monastic community and communism of goods should prevail. The entire education of youth, with the exception of the first physical care of children by the family, should be the task of the state. Plato's most important student is Aristotle of Stagira in Thrace. He became Plato's pupil at the age of eighteen. But he was a student who soon went his own way. In 343, Aristotle became the tutor of Alexander, the son of King Philip of Macedonia. When Alexander undertook his Asian conquests, Aristotle went back to Athens and opened a school there. The relation of Aristotle's worldview to that of Plato can be illustrated by the following comparison. Plato's ideas are quite foreign to the matter in which they are embodied. They are like the idea of the work of art, which lives in the head of the artist and which he forms into his material. This material, the marble of a statue, is something completely foreign to the artist's idea. Aristotle does not think of the relationship of ideas to matter in this way. For him the idea lies in the matter itself. It is as if a work of art did not receive its idea imprinted by the artist, but as if it gave itself its form by a force inherent in the material. Aristotle calls the ideas inherent in the material the forms of things. Thus, in the sense of Aristotle, there is no idea of the lion, for example, separate from the substance. This idea lies in the substance itself. There is, according to Aristotle, no matter without form and no form without matter. A living being develops from the germ in the mother's womb up to its formed shape, because the form is active in the living substance and works like a force innate to it. In the first development of a living being this power or form is already present; only it is not yet externally visible; it is, as it were, still dormant. But it works itself out so that the substance takes on the form which already lies in it as a dormant force in the beginning. In the beginning of things there was only external formless matter. The power or the substance still slumbered completely in it. There was a chaos with an immeasurable power sleeping in it. In order to awaken this force, so that the chaos formed itself to the manifold world of the things, a first impulse was necessary. Therefore Aristotle assumes a first mover of the world, a divine world cause. If the idea or, as Aristotle expresses himself, the form lies in every thing itself, then one cannot, as Plato thinks, regard things as mere mirages and shadows and raise oneself with one's thinking into a completely different world, if one wants to attain the true, but rather one must turn precisely to the sensuous things themselves and bring to light the essence lying in them. Thus, thinking observation itself gives enlightenment about the world. Because Aristotle was convinced of this, he turned his attention above all to observation. He became thereby a pioneer of the sciences. He cultivated the individual natural sciences in as comprehensive a way as was at all possible for his time. He is the acknowledged \"father of natural history\". From him, for example, there are fine and spiritual studies on the development of living beings from the germinal state on. Such investigations were connected with his world view thoughts in the most natural way. He had to be of the opinion that, for example, in the egg the whole living being is already present, only not yet in an outwardly visible way. He says to himself: if a living being arises from the egg, then it must be this living being itself, which works its way into existence in the egg. If we look at an egg, it basically has a double essence. First, it is as it appears to our eyes. But it still has an invisible essence, which will appear only later, when it will be a formed bird. Aristotle carries out this view for the whole nature. Only before the human being he stops. In the human egg there is already the whole man, even the soul, in so far as it carries out lowly tasks, which can also be carried out by the animal. But it should be different with the spirit of man, which carries out the higher activities of thinking. This spirit is not yet in the human germ. If the germ were left to itself, it could only reach the level of an animal being. A thinking spirit would not arise. For such a spirit to come into being, a higher creative power must step in at the moment when the purely animal development of man has progressed far enough, and create the spirit in the body. In human development everything happens in a natural way up to a certain moment, namely until the body is so far advanced that it can accommodate the spirit. Then, when this has occurred, when through natural development the body has progressed so far that it has all the necessary organs that the spirit needs for its purposes, then the spirit is created into its bodily dwelling place. Thus Aristotle thinks of man's spirit-soul as having come into being in time; but he does not make it come into being by the same forces by which the body comes into being, but by a higher influence. It must be emphasized, however, that the organs of which the spirit makes use have come into being through the development of the body. If therefore the spirit makes use of the eye, in order to make thoughts about the seen, then it can this only within the body, which developed an eye for it first. Therefore Aristotle cannot speak of immortality in the sense that after death the spirit continues in the same sense as it is before death. Because by the death his organs perish. It can no longer perceive. It no longer has any connection with the world. Therefore, one must not claim that Aristotle imagines immortality as if the spirit left its body like an earthly prison and continued to exist with the qualities that are known about it. Rather, it is deprived of all the properties that it has in its earthly existence. He then indeed leads a kind of shadow existence like the Greek heroes in the underworld. And of this life in the underworld Achilles makes the famous statement: \"Better a day laborer in the light of the sun than a king over the shadows.\" With such a view of the spirit Aristotle had to regard also the moral action as such, which this spirit exercises with the help of the animal soul. The animal part of the soul, after all, arose naturally. If this part acts alone, that is, if man follows his animal instincts and passions alone, then he cannot be a virtuous man. He will only become so when the spirit takes possession of the animal instincts and passions and gives them the right measure. The animal nature of man would do either too much or too little in all things. The man who merely follows his passions is either foolhardy or cowardly. The spirit alone finds the right middle between foolhardiness and cowardice, namely prudent bravery. With regard to the state, Aristotle professes the view that the commonwealth must take into account the needs of all its members. It is part of the nature of man to live in a commonwealth. One of Aristotle's sayings is: \"He who wants to live for himself alone must be either a god or an animal.... But man is a political animal.\" Aristotle does not assume a form of state that is right for all people, but in each individual case he finds the form of state best suited to the needs of the people in question. In any case, however, he imposes on the state the duty to care for the growing generation. Education is thus a matter for the state, and the purpose of education appears to him to be the formation of virtue. Whoever wants to fully understand the Greek culture in its peculiarity must not forget that this culture was built on the basis of slavery. The educated within Greek culture could reach their form of education only by the fact that the possibility was offered to them by the large army of the slaves. Without slavery, even the most advanced Greek could not conceive of culture. Therefore, even Aristotle sees slavery as a necessity of nature. He simply takes it for granted, because he believes that many people are so constituted by their whole nature that they are not at all suitable for full freedom. It must not be overlooked, however, that the Greek was concerned with the welfare of his slaves; and Aristotle, too, speaks of the master's obligation to care conscientiously for his slaves and to respect human dignity in them. Aristotle has dominated Western education for more than a millennium. For many centuries people were concerned not with the things of nature themselves, but with Aristotle's opinions about them. His writings were accorded perfect authority. All scholarship consisted in explaining the writings of the ancient sage. In addition, for a long time these writings were only available in a very imperfect and unreliable form. Therefore, the most diverse opinions were considered as those which were supposed to come from Aristotle. Only by the Christian philosopher Z7homas of Aquino the writings of the \"master of those who know\" were produced in such a way that one could say that one had to do with a reasonably reliable text. Moreover, until the 12th century, one dealt almost exclusively with a part of Aristotle's thought, with his logical investigations. It must be said, however, that Aristotle became particularly pioneering in this field. He established the art of thinking correctly, that is, logic, in such a way that even Kant at the end of the 18th century could be of the opinion that logic had not advanced by any essential step since Aristotle. The art of deducing, of proving, in the right way by appropriate conclusions of thought from one truth, Aristotle masterfully brought into a system. And since scholarship in the Middle Ages was less interested in expanding the human mind by observation of nature than in supporting the truths of revelation by logical proofs, it must have been particularly concerned with the handling of the doctrine of thought. What Aristotle had really taught was clouded soon after his death by the interpretations which his successors gave to his views, and also by other opinions which joined his own. We see in the next centuries after Aristotle first three world views appear, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism. The Stoic school was founded by Zeno of Kition in Cyprus, who lived from 342-270 BC. The school takes its name from the colorful portico (stoa) in Athens where its teachers taught classes. Public life in Greece had fallen into an even greater looseness since the days of the Sophists. The individual stood more and more for himself. Private virtue increasingly took the place of public virtue in the center of thought. The Stoics considered the highest thing that man could achieve to be perfect equanimity in life. He who can be put into mental turmoil by his desires, by his passions, cannot be granted such equanimity. He is driven hither and thither by lust and desire without being able to feel satisfied. Therefore, one should bring it so far that one is independent of lust and desire and leads such a life alone, which is regulated by wise insight. The Stoics thought of the world as originating from a kind of primordial fire. They were of the opinion that everything came out of the fire, and that also into the fire everything returns. Then again from the fire exactly the same world renews itself, which was already there. The world exists therefore not once, but innumerable times in the completely same way. Every single process has already existed infinitely often and will return infinitely often. This is the doctrine of the eternal return of all things and processes, which in our days Friedrich Nietzsche has renewed in exactly the same way. Such an explanation of the world agrees in the best way with the moral doctrine of the Stoics. For if everything has already existed, then man cannot create anything new. It is therefore natural that he sees the highest moral wisdom in equanimity towards everything that must come in any case. The Epicureans saw the goal of life in the satisfaction that existence gives to man when he strives for pleasure and happiness in a rational way. It is unreasonable to pursue petty pleasures, for these must in most cases lead to disappointment, even unhappiness; but it is equally unreasonable to spurn the noble, high pleasures, for they lead to the lasting satisfaction that constitutes man's happiness in life. The whole of Epicurus' view of nature bears a stamp which shows that it is concerned with lasting satisfaction in life. Above all, a correct view of the power of judgment is considered, so that man can find his way in life through his thinking. For the senses do not deceive us, only our thinking can deceive us. If the eye sees a stick dipped in water broken, the eye does not deceive us. The real facts are such that the staff must appear broken to us. The deception arises only when our thinking forms a false judgment about how it is that the rod appears broken. Epicurus' view found numerous followers at the end of the antiquity, especially the Romans striving for education sought satisfaction in it. The Roman poet 7. Lucretius Carus gave it a perfect expression in his ingenious teaching poem \"On Nature\". Skepticism is the world view of doubt and mistrust. Its first significant confessor is Pyrrho, who was already a contemporary of Aristotle, but at that time made little impression. Only his successors found followers for their opinion that the cognitive powers of man are not sufficient to gain a mental image of the true reality. They believed that one could only express human opinions about things; whether things really behaved as our thinking tells us, nothing could be decided about that. The manifold attempts to arrive at a world view through thinking had led to such diverse, partly contradictory mental images that at the end of antiquity one came to distrust all sense perception and all thinking. In addition there were mental images, like those of Plato, that the sensual world was only a dream and a mirage. Such mental images were now combined with certain Oriental thoughts which preached the nothingness and worthlessness of life. From these details the Neo-Platonism was built up in Alexandria in the centuries of the antiquity coming to an end. Philo, who lived at the time of Christ, and Plotinus are to be mentioned as the most important professors of this doctrine. Philo draws from the teachings of Plato the consequences for the moral life. If reality is a delusion, then virtue can only consist in turning away from this reality and in directing all thoughts and sensations to the only true reality, which he sought in God. What Plato had sought in the world of ideas, Philo believed to find in the God of Judaism. Plotinus then does not seek to reach this God through rational cognition, for this can only refer to the finite, transient: he seeks to come to the eternal primordial being through inner enlightenment, through ecstatic immersion in the depths of the soul. Through such immersion, man comes to the primordial being who has poured himself into the world. This world is only an imperfect outflow, an apostasy from the primordial being. 2 The Worldviews of the Middle Ages and Modern Times Something completely new appears with Christianity in the worldview development of the Occident. The rational thinking is pushed into the shade by a completely different authority, by the revelation. Truth does not come from thinking, but comes from a higher power that has revealed it to man: this now becomes conviction. It is belief in facts of supernatural significance and disbelief in the face of reason that constitutes the essence of Christianity. The confessors of the Christian doctrine do not want to believe in their thinking, but in sensuous events, through which the truth has made itself known. \"What has happened from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we ourselves have beheld, what our hands have touched of the word of life... what we have seen and heard we report to you, that you may have fellowship with us.\" So says the 1st Epistle of John. And Augustine says, \"I would not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so.\" What Christ's contemporaries saw and heard, and what the Church preserves as such heard and seen by tradition, now becomes truth; it is no longer what man achieves by his thinking that counts as such. In Christianity, on the one hand, the religious world of thought of Judaism, on the other hand, the mental images of the Greek worldview come to us. The religion of Judaism was originally a national-egoistic one. God chose his people for earthly power and glory. But this people had to experience the most bitter disappointments. It had come into captivity and subservience to other nations. Its hopes for the Messiah arose from the fact that it expected redemption from its shame and humiliation from its God. This humiliation was attributed to its own sinfulness. Here mental images of turning away from the life that led to sinfulness intrude. One should not cling to this life, which leads to sin; one should rather turn to God, who will soon bring his kingdom to this earth and free people from shame. Jesus was full of such mental images. He wanted to speak to the poor and oppressed, not to those who cling to the treasures of this life. The Kingdom of Heaven, which is coming soon, will belong to those who lived in misery before. And Jesus imagined the kingdom of heaven in temporal proximity. He did not refer people to a spiritual hereafter, but to the fact that in time, and soon, the Lord would come and bring glory to mankind. Already through Paul, even more through the teachers of faith of the first Christian centuries, a connection of the teachings of Christ with the mental images of the later Greek philosophers took the place of naive faith. The temporally near kingdom of heaven thus became the beyond. The Christian faith was reinterpreted with the help of Greek worldview ideas. From this reinterpretation, from this collaboration of originally naive mental images with the traditional views, the dogmatic content of the Christian doctrine developed in the course of time. Thought entered completely into the service of faith, it became the servant of revelation. The whole Middle Ages worked to support the revelation with the help of thinking. How in the first centuries thinking and revelation worked together, the church father Augustine gives a testimony of it; how this happened in the church in the later time, Z7homas of Aquino. Augustine says to himself: Even if we doubt: the one fact remains that thinking, the thinking man himself must be there; otherwise he could not doubt. When I doubt, I think; therefore I am, my reason is there. And in reason certain truths reveal themselves to me. But my reason never recognizes all truth, but always only individual truths. These individual truths can only come from the being in whom all truth is, from God. So there must be a divine being. My reason proves this to me. But my reason gives me only parts of the truth; in revelation lies the highest truth. Thomas Aquino is a comprehensive thinker who processes all the knowledge of his time in an amazingly perceptive way. One must not imagine that this Christian philosopher was hostile to the knowledge of nature and reason. Nature was for him the one source of truth; revelation, however, the other. In his opinion, everything in the world comes from God. Also the natural phenomena are an outflow of the divine being. When we research about nature, we research with our thinking about the deeds of God. But we cannot penetrate to the highest deeds of God with our humanly weak thinking. According to Thomas Aquinas, we can still prove with our reason that there is a God; but we cannot learn anything from reason about the nature of God, about His Trinity, about the redemption of men through Christ, about the power of the sacraments, and so on; about this we are informed by revelation through the authority of the Church. It is not because these things have nothing at all to do with reason, Thomas thinks, that man cannot reach them by his reasoning, but only because human reason is too weak. A stronger reason could therefore also comprehend the revealed truths. This view is presented in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages. German mysticism took a different path than scholasticism to reach the truth. The most important mystics are: Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Heinrich Suso, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius, They form the forerunners of the newer world views insofar as they did not start from an external authority, but wanted to search for the truth in the soul of man and in the phenomena of nature. Not an external Christ can, in their opinion, show man the way to his goal, but only the spiritual forces within man show this way. \"The physician must go through the exams of nature,\" says Paracelsus, to point out that in nature itself is the source of truth. And Angelus Silesius emphasizes that not apart from the things of nature is a divine entity, but that God is in nature. How nature itself is the divine and creates as the divine, he expresses in beautiful sentences, such as, \"I know that without me God cannot live a nu; if I become too not, he must give up the ghost from need.\" God has no life apart from things, but only in things. Jakob Böhme's world view is also completely dominated by such a mental image. It is evident from scholasticism that it was always striving to establish a harmony between reason and revelation. This could not be done without pretentious logic, without the most subtle conclusions. The mystics wanted to free themselves from such conclusions. The highest thing that man can know seems to them impossible to be based on logical subtleties, it must be revealed clearly and directly in nature and in the human mind. Luther also started from similar feelings. He was less concerned with what mattered to the mystic: he wanted to save the divine revelation above all from the contradiction of reason. He tried to achieve this, in contrast to the scholastics, by saying: Reason has no right at all to decide in matters of faith. Reason should deal with the explanation of world phenomena; it has nothing to do with the truths of faith. The revealed word is the source of faith. Reason has nothing in common with this faith; it is none of its business. It cannot refute it, nor can it prove it. It stands firmly for itself. When reason approaches religious truths, there is only vain bickering and gossip. That is why Luther reviled Aristotle, on whose teachings the scholastics had relied when they wanted to give faith a foundation through reason. He says: \"This God-cursed Aristotle is a true devil, a ghoulish slanderer, a wicked sycophant (slanderer), a prince of darkness, a beast, an ugly deceiver of mankind, almost destitute of all philosophy, an open and acknowledged liar, a lecherous goat.\" You can see what we are dealing with. Aristotle had wanted to reach the highest truths through human thinking; Luther wanted to secure these highest truths once and for all before processing them through reason. That is why he also calls reason \"the devil's whore, which can do nothing but incinerate and desecrate what God speaks and does.\" We see Luther's mental images still continuing today in the same form, even if modern theology puts a progressive cloak around them. In the much praised \"Essence of Christianity\" by Adolf Harnack, we read: \"Science is not able to give meaning to life.... Religion, namely love of God and neighbor, is what gives meaning to life.... Jesus' real greatness is that he led people to God.... The Christian religion is eternal life in the midst of time.\" Shortly after Luther's appearance, reason, which he reviled, achieved one victory after another. Copernicus established his new view of the motion of the heavenly bodies. Kepler established the laws according to which the planets move around the sun; Galileo pointed the telescope out into unmeasured celestial spaces and thus gave nature the opportunity to reveal a wealth of facts on its own. Through such advances, natural science had to gain confidence in itself and in reason. Galileo reflects the feelings that settled in a thinker of that time. One believed now no longer to work in the sense of Aristotle, if one held on to what he had asserted with his limited knowledge. This is what the Middle Ages did. Now one was of the opinion that one creates in the spirit of Aristotle, if one, like him, directed the view into the nature, It is golden words which spoke in this respect Galilei. \"You always have it\" - he says - \"with your Aristotle, who cannot speak. But I tell you that if Aristotle were here, he would either be convinced by us, or refute our reasons and teach us better. ... Philosophy is written in that greatest book which is continually open before our eyes, I mean the universe, but which cannot be understood unless one has first understood the language and learned the signs in which it is written.\" Giordano Bruno is one of those spirits of this flourishing thought, who was able to build up an explanation of the world in the sense of the view of nature, but who besides that completely adhered to the traditional dogmas, without giving an account of how one can be united with the other. If human thinking did not want to deny itself, if it did not want to be pushed into a completely subordinate position, it could only tread the path again in a new way, which the Greek world views had already sought. It had to seek to penetrate out of itself to the highest truths. René Descartes (Cartesius) was one of the first who made an attempt. His way has much similarity with that of Augustine. Descartes also started from the doubt of all truth. And also he said to himself: Even if I can doubt about everything, I cannot doubt that I am. I think when I doubt; if I did not think, I could not doubt. But if I think, then I am. \"I think, therefore I am\" (cogito, ergo sum), that is the famous principle of Descartes. And from this basic truth Descartes seeks to ascend to the higher knowledge. He says to himself: What I see so clearly and distinctly, as that I am myself, must also be equally true. - And now a peculiar phenomenon occurs with him. The Christian mental images of God, soul and immortality, which a centuries-long education has inculcated in the adventurous mankind, he believes to find in his reason as certain truths as the knowledge that he is himself. These essential components of the old theology reappear there as alleged truths of reason. We even find in Descartes the old conception of the soul again. He thinks of this soul as an independent spiritual being, which only makes use of the body. We have met such an idea in Aristotle. The animals have, according to Descartes, nothing of a soul. They are automata. Man has a soul which has its seat in the brain and interacts with the soulless body through the pineal gland. We see in Descartes an endeavor which is also present in the scholastics, namely to want to prove the \"highest truths\" brought from the old tradition by reason. Only the scholastics openly admit that they want this, while Descartes believes to draw all proofs purely from reason itself. So Descartes apparently proved from reason what came only from religion. This disguised scholasticism still prevailed for a long time; and in Germany we have in Leibniz and in Wolff its most important representatives. Leibniz saves the old conception of the soul by making everything a kind of independent animate beings. These do not come into being and do not pass away. And he saves the conception of God by ascribing to it that it brings all beings into a harmonious interaction. Again and again the old religious mental images appear as alleged truths of reason. This is also the case with Wolff. He distinguishes sensual truths, which are gained by observation, and higher knowledge, which reason draws from itself. But these higher truths, seen in the light, are nothing else than the old truths of revelation gained by mutilation and sifting. No wonder that reason, in proving such truths, relied on highly questionable concepts which could not stand up to closer critical examination. Such a critical examination of the process of proving human reason was undertaken by the English thinkers Locke, David Hume, and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Locke examined human cognition and believed to find that we can come to knowledge only by observing the processes of nature itself. Hume now asked what kind of knowledge these were. He said to himself: If I observe today that the heat of the sun is the cause of the heating of the stone: have I a right to say that it will always be so? If I perceive a cause and then an effect: may I say, that cause will always and necessarily have this effect? No, I am not allowed to. I see the stone fall to the earth and perceive that it makes a cavity in the earth. That it must be so, that it could not be also differently, of it I can assert nothing. I see certain processes and also get used to seeing them in a certain context. But whether such a connection really exists, whether there are laws of nature which can tell me something real about the connection of things, I know nothing about it. Kant, who had lived in the mental images of Wolff's world view until his manhood, was shaken in all his convictions when he got to know the writings of Hume. He had not doubted before that reason could prove eternal truths; Hume had shown that even in the case of simple truths there could be no question of proof, but that we accept everything we believe only out of habit. Should there really be no eternal truths, Kant asked himself. There must be such. He did not doubt that the truths of mathematics, for example, must always and necessarily be true. Nor did he doubt that something like the following must be eternally valid: every effect has a cause. But Hume convinced him of this, that these findings could not be eternally true, if we had gained them from observation from outside. For observation can only tell us what has always been; but not whether this must always be so. Kant found a way out. He said: it does not depend at all on the things in nature how they appear to us. It depends solely on ourselves. I am set up in such a way that for me \"twice two must be four\"; I am set up in such a way that for me every effect must have a cause. May it therefore happen outside, in the \"thing in itself\", as it may always be, may there once be the things in such a way that \"twice two three\" is, another time that \"twice two five\" is; all this cannot come to me. I can only perceive that \"twice two four\" is, consequently everything appears to me in such a way that \"twice two four\" is. I can only link an effect to a cause; consequently everything appears to me as if effects were always linked to causes. Whether also in the \"thing in itself\" causes are connected with effects, I don't know. I am like afflicted with blue glasses. May the things outside have whatever colors, I know in advance that everything will appear to me in a blue color tone. How the \"things in themselves\" are, I do not know; I only know how they appear to me. Since God, immortality and freedom of the human will cannot be observed at all, do not appear, human thinking, reason cannot make out anything about these things. They do not concern reason. But do they therefore not concern man at all? So Kant asks himself. They concern man very much, he answers. But one cannot understand their existence; one must believe it. I know that I should do my duty. A categorical imperative speaks in me: Thou shalt. So I must also be able to do it. At least I have to believe that I can. And for this belief I need another. I myself cannot give the necessary emphasis to the performance of my duty. I cannot arrange the world in such a way that it corresponds to what I must regard as moral world order. Therefore there must be a God who determines this moral world order. He also gives my soul immortality, so that in eternal life it can enjoy the fruits of its duties, which can never be granted to it in this transient, imperfect life. One sees, with Kant everything reappears as faith what knowledge can never reach. Kant achieved in a different way something similar to what Luther aimed at in his way. Luther wanted to exclude knowledge from the objects of faith. Kant wanted the same thing. His faith is no longer Bible faith; he speaks of a \"religion within the limits of mere reason.\" But the cognition, the knowledge, should be limited only to the phenomena; about the objects of faith they should have no say. Kant has rightly been called the philosopher of Protestantism. He has himself best described what he thinks he has achieved with the words: \"I had therefore to abolish knowledge in order to make room for faith.\" Knowledge, then, in Kant's sense, is to deal only with the subordinate world which gives no meaning to life; what gives meaning to life are objects of faith which no knowledge can approach. Whoever wants to save faith can do it with the weapons of Kant's worldview; for knowledge has no power - in the sense of this view - to make out anything about the highest truths. The philosophy of the 19th century is in many of its currents under the influence of the Kantian thoughts. One can so comfortably clip the wings of knowledge with them; one can deny the right of thinking to have a say about the highest things. One can say, for example: What does natural science want? It can give only subordinate wisdom to the best. Kant, whom we like to call the great reformer of philosophy, has proved once and for all that knowledge is limited, subordinate, that it cannot give meaning to life. The world views of the present, which refer to such self-mutilation of knowledge, have not even penetrated to the standpoint of scholasticism, which at least felt obliged to bring about a harmony between knowledge and faith. Du Bois-Reymond even put a scientific cloak around this point of view in his famous lecture: \"On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature\". 3. 3 The New Worldviews 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.\n\"All men naturally desire knowledge; a sign of this is their love for the senses, which they love for their own sake, even apart from their usefulness; especially those of the face. Not only for the sake of action, but also without such intention, they prefer sight, so to speak, to everything else, because this sense brings us the most knowledge of all and reveals many qualities of things. All animals live in their mental images and have but little experience; the human race, on the other hand, lives also in art and in rational thought.\"\nAnd Hegel especially emphasized the seemingly self-evident, yet highly important sentence:\n\"Thinking first makes the soul, with which the animal is also endowed, a spirit.\"\nMan cannot but submit to himself numerous questions about the world and about himself. The answers that he gives himself, through his thinking, to these questions, make up the \"world and life views\".\nAngelus Silesius, a German thinker of the 17th century, aptly said that the rose blossoms simply because it blossoms; it does not ask why it blossoms. Man cannot live like that. He must ask himself what reason the world and he himself have. In the first place, man naturally puts his thinking at the service of practical life. He makes tools, machines and devices with the help of thinking, by which he can satisfy his needs in a more perfect way than is possible for an animal. But in the second place he wants to achieve something by his thinking which has nothing to do with practical utility; he wants to enlighten himself about things, he wants to recognize how the facts which he encounters in life are connected. The first mental images that man forms about the connection of things are the religious ones. He thinks to himself that the events in nature are caused by beings similar to himself. He just imagines these beings to be more powerful than himself. Man creates gods in his own image. As he works, so he imagines the world as a work of the gods. Gradually, however, scientific views grow out of the religious ones. Man learns to observe nature and its forces. He can no longer be content with imagining these forces as if they were similar to human forces. He no longer creates a God in his own image, but he forms thoughts about the connection of the world phenomena according to scientific observation provides him.\nTherefore a thinking world view arises within the occidental culture in the time in which the natural science has come to a certain height. Ancient Greeks were natural the first scientists. They handed down to us a world view which no longer depended on religious mental images. Thales, the first great thinker, of whom Aristotle tells us, was an important natural scientist for his time. He had already been able to predict the solar eclipse that occurred on May 28, 585 B.C., when the Median and Lydian armies were facing each other at the Halys River. Also his contemporary Anaximander was a great astronomer.\nIf in our time the cultivation of the \"world and life view\", which is taught as philosophy at our universities, does not enjoy any special reputation, but is rather considered as a one-sided and for life dispensable school scholarship, then this stems from the fact that the philosophers of the present time have mostly lost the right connection with the individual sciences. Whoever wants to build up a \"world and life view\" cannot stop at a single science. He must assimilate all the knowledge of his time, everything we know about the development of nature and culture. All other sciences are tools for the philosopher. Today, however, it is difficult to form a comprehensive \"world and life view\" in view of the great amount of knowledge that has gradually become available. Thus it happens that the teachers of the world- and life-view often deal with questions which do not arise from a true need of man, but which are presented to them by their one-sided thinking adhering to certain traditions.\nA true \"world- and life-view\" must deal with questions which cannot be answered in any single science. For every single science has to do with a certain area of nature or of human life. The \"world- and life-view\" must look for a coherence of thoughts in what all individual sciences offer us in terms of knowledge. The individual science can also not be everyone's thing. On the other hand, the \"world and life view\" is of interest to all people. Not everyone can develop it, because not everyone can look around in all sciences. But as it requires innumerable knowledge to bring a table into being, which not everyone who needs a table can acquire, so it requires also for the development of a \"world view\" a comprehensive equipment, which cannot be available to everyone. Anyone can use a table, but only those who have learned to do so can make one. Everybody is interested in world- and life-view; only those can and should build up and teach it, who can get the tools for it from all single sciences. The sciences are only the tools of the world and life views.\nKant posed the basic questions that generate in man the need for a worldview as follows: \"What can I know? What shall I do? What may I hope?\" Goethe expressed the matter more briefly and significantly by saying, \"If I know my relation to myself and to the external world, I call it truth.\" In fact, man wants to achieve nothing else through a world and life view than an insight into the meaning of his own existence and how he is related to the nature that is outside of him.\nThe oldest Greek thinkers, so Aristotle tells us, considered the material beginnings to be the sole ones of all. That, from which all things consist, from which everything originates and into which everything finally passes away again: they thought about that. In the moist earth the seeds of the living beings develop. Thales was an islander. He saw how infinite life develops in the sea. The thought was obvious that the water is the original material from which all things develop. Thus it came that the first Greek thinker declared water to be the basis of all things. From water, he said, everything originates, and in water everything changes. Anaximander came one step further. He no longer trusted the senses as much as Thales. One can see the water. But everything what one can see changes into other. This is how Anaximander thought. The water can become solid by freezing; it can become vaporous by evaporation. Under steam and air the ancients thought the same. Likewise they called everything solid earth. The solid water, the earth, can change itself into liquid, this into air, said itself accordingly Anaximander, No certain substance is therefore something lasting. Therefore he did not look for the original cause in a certain substance, but in the indeterminate one. Anaximenes then again assumed a certain original substance, namely the air. He says: \"As our soul, which is air, holds us together, so breath and air embrace the whole world.\"\nA much higher stage of the world view stepped Heraclitus. Above all, the eternal change of all things imposed itself on him. Nothing remains, everything changes. Only our senses deceive us when they tell us that something remains. I cannot get into the same river twice. Because only apparently it is the same river, into which I step the second time. The water, of which the river consists, has become a completely different one. And so it is with all things. The tree of today is not the tree of yesterday. Other juices have moved into it; much of what was still in it yesterday has been excreted in the meantime. In the saying: \"Everything flows\", Heraclitus therefore sums up his conviction. Therefore the most restless element, the fire, becomes for him the image of all coming into being and passing away.\nEmpedocles of Agrigento started from completely different points of view. His predecessors had searched for a single original substance. He let four primeval substances be considered as synonymous next to each other. Earth, water, air, fire exist from the beginning next to each other. None of these substances can change into the other. They can mix themselves only in the most different way. And by their mixture all the different things in the nature originate. Empedocles therefore no longer believes that a thing really comes into being and perishes. He believes that something appears to come into being when, for example, water and fire mix; and he believes that the same thing appears to pass away again when water and fire separate again. Aristotle tells us of Empedocles: \"His four beginnings, according to him, are always to persist, to be without coming into being, and to combine in various proportions into one object or from it.\" Empedocles assumes forces that prevail between his four substances. Two or more substances combine when there is an attractive force between them; they separate when there is a repulsive force between them. These attractive and repulsive forces can, according to the conviction of Empedocles, not only build up the inanimate nature from the four substances, but also the whole realm of the living. He imagines that naturally, through the forces, animal and vegetable bodies come into being. And because there is no intelligible intelligence guiding this process, there is a colorful mixture of functional and non-functional living forms. Only the functional ones can exist; the non-functional ones must perish of their own accord. This thought of Empedocles is already similar to that of Darwin of the \"struggle for existence\". Darwin also imagines that in nature purposeful and inexpedient arise and the world appears as a purposeful one only because in the \"struggle for existence\" the inexpedient is continuously defeated, thus must perish.\nAnaxagoras, the contemporary of Empedocles, did not believe, like the latter, to be able to explain the purposeful order of the world from the mere working of mechanical natural forces. He assumed that a spiritual being, a general world understanding gives to the things their existence and their order. He imagined that everything consisted of smallest parts, the so-called homeomerisms, which all have different properties among themselves. The general world understanding puts these original parts together that they result in purposeful things and, in the whole, a harmoniously arranged world building. Because he put a general world understanding in the place of the old people gods, Anaxagoras was accused of denial of God in Athens and had to flee to Lampsakus. In Athens, where he had gone from Klazomenae, he was in relations with Pericles, Euripides and Themistocles.\nThe smallest parts, the homoeomeries, or seeds of all things, which Anaxagoras assumed, he imagined to be quite different from each other. In place of these smallest parts Democritus put such, which differed by nothing else than by size, shape, position and arrangement in space. In all other qualities the smallest components of the things, the atoms, should be equal to each other. What really happens in nature, according to this atomistic conviction, can be nothing else than that the position and arrangement of the smallest parts of the body change. If a body changes its color, then in reality the arrangement of its atoms has changed. Except the empty space and the atoms filling it, there is nothing in the world. There is no power which gives the atoms their order. These are in perpetual motion. Some move slower, others faster. The faster ones must come into contact with the slower ones. Through this, bodies clump together. So nothing comes into being by a mind in the world or by a general reason, but by blind natural necessity, which can also be called coincidence. It is explicable from these convictions that the followers of Democritus led a violent fight against the old people-gods. They were decided deniers of God or atheists. One must see in them the forerunners of the materialistic world views of later centuries.\nParmenides and his followers tried to approach the world phenomena from a completely different side than the thinkers mentioned so far. They assumed that our senses cannot provide us with a faithful, true picture of the world. Heraclitus drew the conclusion from the fact that everything changes eternally, that there is nothing permanent, but that the eternal flow of all things corresponds to the true being. Parmenides said exactly the other way round: because in the outside world everything changes, because here eternally everything comes into being and passes away, therefore we cannot win the true, the lasting by observation of the outside world. We have to understand what this outer world presents to us as appearance and can only gain the eternal, the lasting through thinking itself. The outer world is a deception of the senses, a dream, which is something completely different from what the senses make us believe. What this dream really is, what remains eternally the same, we cannot gain by observing the outside world, that reveals itself to us through thinking. In the outside world there is multiplicity and diversity; in thinking the Eternal-One reveals itself to us, which does not change, which always remains the same. Thus Parmenides expresses himself in his teaching poem \"On Nature\". So we are dealing with a world view which does not want to get the truth from the things themselves, but which tries to spin the original reason of the world out of thinking. If one wants to make clear from which basic feeling such a world view originates, then one must keep in mind that often thinking must indeed interpret, explain the perceptions of the senses in the right way, in order to come to a satisfying thought. If we hold a stick in the water, it appears broken to the eye. Thought must look for the reasons why the stick appears broken. So we get a satisfactory mental image of this appearance only by our thinking explaining the perception. If we look at the starry sky only with our senses, we cannot form any other mental image than the one that the earth stands in the center of the world and that the sun, the moon and all the stars move around it. Only by thinking we gain another mental image. In this case even the thinking gives us a completely different picture than the sensual perception. So one can say that the senses deceive us in a certain respect. But the world view of Parmenides and his followers is a one-sided exaggeration of this fact. For as perception supplies us with certain appearances which deceive us, so it supplies us again with other facts by which we can correct the deception. Copernicus did not come to his view of the movement of the celestial bodies by spinning it out of mere thinking, but by bringing one perception into harmony with others.\nIn contrast to the view of Parmenides stands another older world view. It does not proceed to regard the connections in the external world as a deception, but it wants to lead exactly by a deeper observation of this external world to the realization that in the world everything is based on a great harmony, that in all things measure and number exist. This view is that of the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras lived in the 6th century B.C. Aristotle tells of the Pythagoreans that they turned to mathematics at the same time as the thinkers mentioned above and even before them. \"They first continued this and, being completely absorbed in it, they considered the beginnings in it also to be the beginnings of all things. Since in mathematics the numbers are by nature the first, and since they believed to see in the numbers much similarity with the things and the becoming, and indeed in the numbers more than in the fire, the earth and the water, so they regarded one property of the numbers as the justice, another as the soul and the spirit, again another as the time, and so on for all the rest. They further found in the numbers the properties and the relations of harmony, and thus everything else seemed to be, according to its whole nature, the image of the numbers, and the numbers the first in nature.\" Whoever knows how to appreciate the importance which measure and number have in nature, will not find it surprising that such a world view as the Pythagorean one could arise. If a string of certain length is struck, a certain tone is produced. If the string is shortened in certain numerical ratios, then always other tones are produced. One can express the pitch by numerical ratios. Physics also expresses colors in numerical ratios. When two bodies combine to form a substance, this always happens in such a way that the weights of one body, which can be expressed by numbers, combine with those of the other body. Such examples of which role number and measure play in nature can be cited innumerable. The Pythagorean worldview expresses this fact in a one-sided way by saying: Measure and number are the origin of all things.\nIn all world views discussed so far a question slumbers. It is nowhere clearly expressed in them, because the thinkers obviously thought that it answers itself with the other questions they asked. It is the question of the relation of man to the world. If Thales thinks all things originated from water, he also thinks man originated from the same source. Heraclitus was of the opinion that man swims along with all others in the eternal river of things; and Anaxagoras thought of man as being built up by his general understanding of the world from his original particles, just as the atomists imagined that chance had also put man together from the atoms. In Empedocles something of the question appears first: What is the relation between man and the rest of nature? How can he recognize the things? How is it possible for him to make mental images of that what is nevertheless outside of him? Empedocles gave the answer: Like can be recognized only by like. - Because man consists of the same substances and forces as the rest of nature, therefore he can also recognize them.\nIn a completely different way a number of thinkers tackled this question, who are usually unrecognized. They are the Sophists, whose most important personality is Protagoras of Abdera. They are usually considered as people who played a superficial game with thinking, a vain disputation, and who lacked all seriousness for the investigation of truth. The way in which the reactionary comedy poet Aristophanes ridiculed them in his dramas contributed a great deal to the opinion that was formed about the Sophists. It may be that individual sophists exaggerated the art of disputation, it may also be that among them there were some who were only concerned with splitting hairs and with a foppish appearance: but this does not apply to the most important of them, for there were men among them who distinguished themselves by a comprehensive knowledge in the most diverse fields. Of Protagoras this must be particularly emphasized, but also of Gorgias we know that he was an outstanding politician, and of Prodicus his pupil Socrates himself boasts that he was an excellent scholar, who was particularly concerned with the ennoblement of language among his pupils.\nProtagoras expresses his basic view in the sentence: \"Man is the measure of all things, of the existing that they are, of the non-existing that they are not. What can this sentence mean? One can say like Parmenides: our senses deceive us. And one could go even further than this and say: perhaps our thinking also deceives us. Protagoras would answer: what is it to a man whether the world is different from him than he perceives and thinks it. Does he then imagine the world for someone else and not for himself? May it be for another being as always: he has not to worry about it. His mental images should serve only him; he should find his way in the world with their help. Man cannot want any other mental images of the world than those that serve him. Whatever is in the world: if man does not perceive it, he cannot care about it. For him there is what he perceives; and it is not there for him what he does not perceive. But this means: man measures things with the measure that his senses and his reason give him. Protagoras gives man a firm position and security in the world through his view. He frees him from innumerable anxious questions, which he raises only because he does not dare to judge things by himself.\nOne may say that through sophistry man is moved into the center of the world view. The fact that this happened at the time of Protagoras is connected with the development of the public conditions in Greece. The social structure of the Greek state associations had loosened. This found its most significant expression in the Peloponnesian Wars, 431-404 BC. Previously, the individual was firmly enclosed in the social context; the community and tradition gave him the standard for all his actions and thoughts. The individual personality had value and meaning only as a member of a whole. Under such conditions it would have been impossible to ask the question: What is the individual worth? The Sophistik is a tremendous progress after the Greek Enlightenment to. Man could now think of arranging his life according to his reason. The sophists went around the country as teachers of virtue. If one wants to teach virtue, one must be convinced that the traditional moral views are not decisive, but that man can recognize virtue through his own reflection.\nSocrates also lived in such mental images of virtue. He must be regarded as a disciple of Sophism. Little is known about him. The reports about what he taught are doubtful. What is clear, however, is that he was primarily a teacher of virtue, like the Sophists. And it is also certain that he was ravishing in the way he taught. His teaching consisted in the fact that in conversation he sought to draw out of the listener himself what he recognized as the right thing to do. The expression \"spiritual midwifery\" is well known in relation to his teachings. He did not want to bring anything into the mind of the student from outside. He was of the opinion that the truth was located in every human being and that one only had to provide help so that this truth would come to light. If we consider this, we can see that Socrates helped reason to its highest right in every single human being. He always brought the student to the point where he could form the right concept of a thing. He started from the experiences of everyday life. One can consider, for example, what virtue is for the craftsman, what virtue is for the merchant, what virtue is for the scholar. One will find that all these different kinds of virtuous life have something in common. This common feature is precisely the concept of virtue. If one proceeds with one's thinking in this way, one follows the so-called inductive procedure. One collects the individual experiences in order to obtain a concept of a thing. When you have this concept, you can define the thing. One has the definition of the thing. A mammal is a living thing with a spine that gives birth to living young. This is the definition of the mammal. It gives the characteristic - giving birth to living young - which is common to all mammals. Thus Socrates acted as a teacher of sharp, clear thinking. This is his great merit. - The Roman orator Cicero said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven to earth. By this is meant that he made his observations especially about man himself. How man should live, that was above all close to his heart. That is why we see in Greece that those who strive for a world view always ask what moral goals man should set for himself.\nThis is immediately apparent in the next successors of Socrates. The Cynics, whose most important personality is Diogenes of Sinope, deal with the question of a natural life. How should man live so that his life does not contradict what nature has placed in him in terms of dispositions and abilities? The Cynics wanted to remove everything artificial and unnatural from life. That above all the greatest simplicity appeared to them as the best, is explicable. Natural is what is a common need of all people. The proletarian came into his own in this conception of life. One can therefore imagine that the so-called higher classes did not like this philosophy very much. What the Cynics demanded did not agree with the artificially created needs. While originally the name Cynics came only from the educational institution - Kynosarges - where the Cynics gave lessons, later it got a contemptuous connotation. Besides the Cynics, the Cyrenaics and the Megarics were active. They, too, were primarily concerned with practical life. The Cyrenaics sought to help lust to its rights. Pleasure corresponds to the nature of man. Virtue cannot consist in eradicating lust within oneself, but in not making oneself a slave to lust. He who strives for pleasure, but always in such a way that he remains master of his pleasures, is virtuous. Only he who becomes the slave of his passions is virtuous.\nThe Megarics held on to Socrates' statement that virtue is teachable, that therefore the perfection of thought must also make one more virtuous. The most important representative of the megaric doctrine is Euclides. To him the good was an outflow of the highest wisdom. Therefore, he was primarily concerned with the attainment of wisdom. And from this estimation of wisdom must have arisen to him the thought that wisdom itself is the original source of the world. If - so he thought - the human being rises by his thinking to concepts, he rises at the same time to the origins of the things. With Euclid the world view takes on a decidedly idealistic coloration. One must imagine the mental image of Euclid like this: There are many lions. The substances of which these consist do not remain together. The single lion arises and passes away. It takes up substances from the outside world and gives them back to it. That what I perceive with the senses, that is the material. What is sensually perceptible at the things, arises therefore and passes away. Nevertheless, a lion which has lived a hundred years ago has something in common with a lion which lives today. It cannot be the substances. It can be only the concept, the idea of the lion which I grasp by my thinking. The lion of today and the lion of a hundred years ago are built according to the same idea. The sensual passes away; the idea remains. The ideas embody themselves in the sense world always anew.\nA pupil of Euclides was Plato. He made his teacher's mental image of the eternity of the ideas his basic conviction. The sense world has only a subordinate value for him. The true things are the ideas. He who looks merely at the things of the sense world has only a simulacrum, a mirage of the true world. Plato's conviction is sharply expressed in the following words: The things of this world, which we perceive with the senses, have no true being; they do not remain. One can just as well call their whole being a non-being. Consequently, he who strives for the true cannot be content with the things of the sense world. For the true can only come from where the abiding is. If one limits oneself to the sensual perception, one resembles a man who sits bound in a dark cave, so that he cannot even turn his head, and who sees nothing but, by the light of a lamp burning behind him, the shadow images of the things behind him and also his own shadow. The ideas are to be compared with the real, true things, and the shadows with the things of the sense world. Even of himself, he who confines himself to the sense world recognizes only a shadow. The tree that I see, the scent of flowers that I breathe: they are only shadows. Only when I raise myself by my thinking to the idea of the tree, I have that which is truly lasting and not a transient mirage of the tree.\nOne must now raise the question: how does Plato think of the relation of his world of ideas to the conceptions of God of the Greeks? This relation can by no means be determined with perfect clarity from Plato's writings. He repeatedly speaks of extra-worldly gods. But one can be of the opinion that he wanted to lean with such sayings merely on the Greek folk religion; and one will not err if one understands his designations of gods only as figurative clarifications. What Plato himself conceives as deity, that is a first moving cause of the world. One must imagine, in the sense of Plato, that the world consists of the ideas and the prime matter. The ideas embody themselves in the prime matter continuously. And the impetus for this embodiment is given by God, as the primordial cause of all movement. God is for Plato at the same time the good. This gives the world a great unified purpose. The good moves all being and happening. The highest world laws thus represent a moral world order.\nPlato wrote down his worldview in conversational form. His form of representation formed an object of admiration within the occidental culture development in the whole subsequent time. - Plato came from a noble family in Athens. From reports we know that he was a head inclined to rapture. He became the most faithful and understanding student of Socrates, attached to the master with unconditional veneration. After the execution of his teacher he went to Megara to Euclides. Later he undertook great journeys to Cyrene, Egypt, Great Greece - i.e. southern Italy - and Sicily. In 389 B.C. he returned to Athens. However, he made a second and third trip to Sicily. After returning from his first Sicilian journey, he founded his school in Athens, from which many of the important men of that time emerged. In Plato's writings one can observe a gradual change of outlook. He adopts mental images that he finds in others. In his first writings he stands entirely on the standpoint he formed as a student of Socrates. Later, Euclides had a strong influence on him, and during his stay in Sicily, he became acquainted with the Pythagoreans. In Egypt, he appropriated various Oriental thoughts. Thus it comes that his world view does not appear in his writings in such a way that it is like from a cast. He later incorporates mental images that he finds into his original views. We may count among these his doctrine of transmigration of souls. The soul already exists before the body. Yes, its embodiment, that is, its connection with matter, is regarded as a kind of punishment which it has to suffer for a guilt contracted in the pre-worldly being. But the soul embodies itself not only once, but repeatedly. Plato brings this view together with the general justice of the world. If everything were to end with one life, the good would be at a disadvantage compared to the bad. Rather, the evil committed by the soul in one life must be atoned for in another. Only when all guilt has found its expiation in the different lives, the soul returns to the realm of ideas from which it originated.\nIn its connection with the body, the soul of man does not form a unity. It breaks down into three partial souls. The lowest soul is that of the sensual life; it has to worry about the nourishing and reproduction instinct. Plato calls the middle soul the willpower in man. Personal courage, bravery is based on it. And the highest soul is the purely spiritual one. It has to take care of the highest knowledge. It is native to the realm of ideas. It is the real immortal part of the human soul. Plato relates his immortality thoughts to the mental image of Socrates that teaching consists only in a kind of midwifery. If this is so, then all the thoughts which are awakened in man must already lie in him. They lie in him, because he had them also already before his birth, since also the soul already existed. So he remembers in life only those thoughts which were already inherent in him before his birth.\nWith Plato's soul doctrine his view of the state is connected again. Also the state is the embodiment of an idea. And it is such an embodiment in the image of human nature, if it is perfect. The individual soul forces are represented in the state by the different estates. The highest soul is represented by the rulers, the middle soul by the guards, who are there for the defense, and the lowest soul by the craftsmen. The Platonic state is a communist state, but with a strictly aristocratic division of the estates. For the two upper estates Plato recommends marriage and possessing no property. Monastic community and communism of goods should prevail. The entire education of youth, with the exception of the first physical care of children by the family, should be the task of the state.\nPlato's most important student is Aristotle of Stagira in Thrace. He became Plato's pupil at the age of eighteen. But he was a student who soon went his own way. In 343, Aristotle became the tutor of Alexander, the son of King Philip of Macedonia. When Alexander undertook his Asian conquests, Aristotle went back to Athens and opened a school there.\nThe relation of Aristotle's worldview to that of Plato can be illustrated by the following comparison. Plato's ideas are quite foreign to the matter in which they are embodied. They are like the idea of the work of art, which lives in the head of the artist and which he forms into his material. This material, the marble of a statue, is something completely foreign to the artist's idea. Aristotle does not think of the relationship of ideas to matter in this way. For him the idea lies in the matter itself. It is as if a work of art did not receive its idea imprinted by the artist, but as if it gave itself its form by a force inherent in the material. Aristotle calls the ideas inherent in the material the forms of things. Thus, in the sense of Aristotle, there is no idea of the lion, for example, separate from the substance. This idea lies in the substance itself. There is, according to Aristotle, no matter without form and no form without matter. A living being develops from the germ in the mother's womb up to its formed shape, because the form is active in the living substance and works like a force innate to it. In the first development of a living being this power or form is already present; only it is not yet externally visible; it is, as it were, still dormant. But it works itself out so that the substance takes on the form which already lies in it as a dormant force in the beginning. In the beginning of things there was only external formless matter. The power or the substance still slumbered completely in it. There was a chaos with an immeasurable power sleeping in it. In order to awaken this force, so that the chaos formed itself to the manifold world of the things, a first impulse was necessary. Therefore Aristotle assumes a first mover of the world, a divine world cause.\nIf the idea or, as Aristotle expresses himself, the form lies in every thing itself, then one cannot, as Plato thinks, regard things as mere mirages and shadows and raise oneself with one's thinking into a completely different world, if one wants to attain the true, but rather one must turn precisely to the sensuous things themselves and bring to light the essence lying in them. Thus, thinking observation itself gives enlightenment about the world. Because Aristotle was convinced of this, he turned his attention above all to observation. He became thereby a pioneer of the sciences. He cultivated the individual natural sciences in as comprehensive a way as was at all possible for his time. He is the acknowledged \"father of natural history\". From him, for example, there are fine and spiritual studies on the development of living beings from the germinal state on. Such investigations were connected with his world view thoughts in the most natural way. He had to be of the opinion that, for example, in the egg the whole living being is already present, only not yet in an outwardly visible way. He says to himself: if a living being arises from the egg, then it must be this living being itself, which works its way into existence in the egg. If we look at an egg, it basically has a double essence. First, it is as it appears to our eyes. But it still has an invisible essence, which will appear only later, when it will be a formed bird.\nAristotle carries out this view for the whole nature. Only before the human being he stops. In the human egg there is already the whole man, even the soul, in so far as it carries out lowly tasks, which can also be carried out by the animal. But it should be different with the spirit of man, which carries out the higher activities of thinking. This spirit is not yet in the human germ. If the germ were left to itself, it could only reach the level of an animal being. A thinking spirit would not arise. For such a spirit to come into being, a higher creative power must step in at the moment when the purely animal development of man has progressed far enough, and create the spirit in the body. In human development everything happens in a natural way up to a certain moment, namely until the body is so far advanced that it can accommodate the spirit. Then, when this has occurred, when through natural development the body has progressed so far that it has all the necessary organs that the spirit needs for its purposes, then the spirit is created into its bodily dwelling place. Thus Aristotle thinks of man's spirit-soul as having come into being in time; but he does not make it come into being by the same forces by which the body comes into being, but by a higher influence. It must be emphasized, however, that the organs of which the spirit makes use have come into being through the development of the body. If therefore the spirit makes use of the eye, in order to make thoughts about the seen, then it can this only within the body, which developed an eye for it first. Therefore Aristotle cannot speak of immortality in the sense that after death the spirit continues in the same sense as it is before death. Because by the death his organs perish. It can no longer perceive. It no longer has any connection with the world. Therefore, one must not claim that Aristotle imagines immortality as if the spirit left its body like an earthly prison and continued to exist with the qualities that are known about it. Rather, it is deprived of all the properties that it has in its earthly existence. He then indeed leads a kind of shadow existence like the Greek heroes in the underworld. And of this life in the underworld Achilles makes the famous statement: \"Better a day laborer in the light of the sun than a king over the shadows.\"\nWith such a view of the spirit Aristotle had to regard also the moral action as such, which this spirit exercises with the help of the animal soul. The animal part of the soul, after all, arose naturally. If this part acts alone, that is, if man follows his animal instincts and passions alone, then he cannot be a virtuous man. He will only become so when the spirit takes possession of the animal instincts and passions and gives them the right measure. The animal nature of man would do either too much or too little in all things. The man who merely follows his passions is either foolhardy or cowardly. The spirit alone finds the right middle between foolhardiness and cowardice, namely prudent bravery.\nWith regard to the state, Aristotle professes the view that the commonwealth must take into account the needs of all its members. It is part of the nature of man to live in a commonwealth. One of Aristotle's sayings is: \"He who wants to live for himself alone must be either a god or an animal.... But man is a political animal.\" Aristotle does not assume a form of state that is right for all people, but in each individual case he finds the form of state best suited to the needs of the people in question. In any case, however, he imposes on the state the duty to care for the growing generation. Education is thus a matter for the state, and the purpose of education appears to him to be the formation of virtue.\nWhoever wants to fully understand the Greek culture in its peculiarity must not forget that this culture was built on the basis of slavery. The educated within Greek culture could reach their form of education only by the fact that the possibility was offered to them by the large army of the slaves. Without slavery, even the most advanced Greek could not conceive of culture. Therefore, even Aristotle sees slavery as a necessity of nature. He simply takes it for granted, because he believes that many people are so constituted by their whole nature that they are not at all suitable for full freedom. It must not be overlooked, however, that the Greek was concerned with the welfare of his slaves; and Aristotle, too, speaks of the master's obligation to care conscientiously for his slaves and to respect human dignity in them.\nAristotle has dominated Western education for more than a millennium. For many centuries people were concerned not with the things of nature themselves, but with Aristotle's opinions about them. His writings were accorded perfect authority. All scholarship consisted in explaining the writings of the ancient sage. In addition, for a long time these writings were only available in a very imperfect and unreliable form. Therefore, the most diverse opinions were considered as those which were supposed to come from Aristotle. Only by the Christian philosopher Z7homas of Aquino the writings of the \"master of those who know\" were produced in such a way that one could say that one had to do with a reasonably reliable text. Moreover, until the 12th century, one dealt almost exclusively with a part of Aristotle's thought, with his logical investigations. It must be said, however, that Aristotle became particularly pioneering in this field. He established the art of thinking correctly, that is, logic, in such a way that even Kant at the end of the 18th century could be of the opinion that logic had not advanced by any essential step since Aristotle. The art of deducing, of proving, in the right way by appropriate conclusions of thought from one truth, Aristotle masterfully brought into a system. And since scholarship in the Middle Ages was less interested in expanding the human mind by observation of nature than in supporting the truths of revelation by logical proofs, it must have been particularly concerned with the handling of the doctrine of thought.\nWhat Aristotle had really taught was clouded soon after his death by the interpretations which his successors gave to his views, and also by other opinions which joined his own. We see in the next centuries after Aristotle first three world views appear, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism.\nThe Stoic school was founded by Zeno of Kition in Cyprus, who lived from 342-270 BC. The school takes its name from the colorful portico (stoa) in Athens where its teachers taught classes. Public life in Greece had fallen into an even greater looseness since the days of the Sophists. The individual stood more and more for himself. Private virtue increasingly took the place of public virtue in the center of thought. The Stoics considered the highest thing that man could achieve to be perfect equanimity in life. He who can be put into mental turmoil by his desires, by his passions, cannot be granted such equanimity. He is driven hither and thither by lust and desire without being able to feel satisfied. Therefore, one should bring it so far that one is independent of lust and desire and leads such a life alone, which is regulated by wise insight. The Stoics thought of the world as originating from a kind of primordial fire. They were of the opinion that everything came out of the fire, and that also into the fire everything returns. Then again from the fire exactly the same world renews itself, which was already there. The world exists therefore not once, but innumerable times in the completely same way. Every single process has already existed infinitely often and will return infinitely often. This is the doctrine of the eternal return of all things and processes, which in our days Friedrich Nietzsche has renewed in exactly the same way. Such an explanation of the world agrees in the best way with the moral doctrine of the Stoics. For if everything has already existed, then man cannot create anything new. It is therefore natural that he sees the highest moral wisdom in equanimity towards everything that must come in any case.\nThe Epicureans saw the goal of life in the satisfaction that existence gives to man when he strives for pleasure and happiness in a rational way. It is unreasonable to pursue petty pleasures, for these must in most cases lead to disappointment, even unhappiness; but it is equally unreasonable to spurn the noble, high pleasures, for they lead to the lasting satisfaction that constitutes man's happiness in life. The whole of Epicurus' view of nature bears a stamp which shows that it is concerned with lasting satisfaction in life. Above all, a correct view of the power of judgment is considered, so that man can find his way in life through his thinking. For the senses do not deceive us, only our thinking can deceive us. If the eye sees a stick dipped in water broken, the eye does not deceive us. The real facts are such that the staff must appear broken to us. The deception arises only when our thinking forms a false judgment about how it is that the rod appears broken. Epicurus' view found numerous followers at the end of the antiquity, especially the Romans striving for education sought satisfaction in it. The Roman poet 7. Lucretius Carus gave it a perfect expression in his ingenious teaching poem \"On Nature\".\nSkepticism is the world view of doubt and mistrust. Its first significant confessor is Pyrrho, who was already a contemporary of Aristotle, but at that time made little impression. Only his successors found followers for their opinion that the cognitive powers of man are not sufficient to gain a mental image of the true reality. They believed that one could only express human opinions about things; whether things really behaved as our thinking tells us, nothing could be decided about that.\nThe manifold attempts to arrive at a world view through thinking had led to such diverse, partly contradictory mental images that at the end of antiquity one came to distrust all sense perception and all thinking. In addition there were mental images, like those of Plato, that the sensual world was only a dream and a mirage. Such mental images were now combined with certain Oriental thoughts which preached the nothingness and worthlessness of life. From these details the Neo-Platonism was built up in Alexandria in the centuries of the antiquity coming to an end. Philo, who lived at the time of Christ, and Plotinus are to be mentioned as the most important professors of this doctrine. Philo draws from the teachings of Plato the consequences for the moral life. If reality is a delusion, then virtue can only consist in turning away from this reality and in directing all thoughts and sensations to the only true reality, which he sought in God. What Plato had sought in the world of ideas, Philo believed to find in the God of Judaism. Plotinus then does not seek to reach this God through rational cognition, for this can only refer to the finite, transient: he seeks to come to the eternal primordial being through inner enlightenment, through ecstatic immersion in the depths of the soul. Through such immersion, man comes to the primordial being who has poured himself into the world. This world is only an imperfect outflow, an apostasy from the primordial being.\nSomething completely new appears with Christianity in the worldview development of the Occident. The rational thinking is pushed into the shade by a completely different authority, by the revelation. Truth does not come from thinking, but comes from a higher power that has revealed it to man: this now becomes conviction. It is belief in facts of supernatural significance and disbelief in the face of reason that constitutes the essence of Christianity. The confessors of the Christian doctrine do not want to believe in their thinking, but in sensuous events, through which the truth has made itself known. \"What has happened from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we ourselves have beheld, what our hands have touched of the word of life... what we have seen and heard we report to you, that you may have fellowship with us.\" So says the 1st Epistle of John. And Augustine says, \"I would not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so.\" What Christ's contemporaries saw and heard, and what the Church preserves as such heard and seen by tradition, now becomes truth; it is no longer what man achieves by his thinking that counts as such.\nIn Christianity, on the one hand, the religious world of thought of Judaism, on the other hand, the mental images of the Greek worldview come to us. The religion of Judaism was originally a national-egoistic one. God chose his people for earthly power and glory. But this people had to experience the most bitter disappointments. It had come into captivity and subservience to other nations. Its hopes for the Messiah arose from the fact that it expected redemption from its shame and humiliation from its God. This humiliation was attributed to its own sinfulness. Here mental images of turning away from the life that led to sinfulness intrude. One should not cling to this life, which leads to sin; one should rather turn to God, who will soon bring his kingdom to this earth and free people from shame. Jesus was full of such mental images. He wanted to speak to the poor and oppressed, not to those who cling to the treasures of this life. The Kingdom of Heaven, which is coming soon, will belong to those who lived in misery before. And Jesus imagined the kingdom of heaven in temporal proximity. He did not refer people to a spiritual hereafter, but to the fact that in time, and soon, the Lord would come and bring glory to mankind. Already through Paul, even more through the teachers of faith of the first Christian centuries, a connection of the teachings of Christ with the mental images of the later Greek philosophers took the place of naive faith. The temporally near kingdom of heaven thus became the beyond. The Christian faith was reinterpreted with the help of Greek worldview ideas. From this reinterpretation, from this collaboration of originally naive mental images with the traditional views, the dogmatic content of the Christian doctrine developed in the course of time. Thought entered completely into the service of faith, it became the servant of revelation. The whole Middle Ages worked to support the revelation with the help of thinking. How in the first centuries thinking and revelation worked together, the church father Augustine gives a testimony of it; how this happened in the church in the later time, Z7homas of Aquino. Augustine says to himself: Even if we doubt: the one fact remains that thinking, the thinking man himself must be there; otherwise he could not doubt. When I doubt, I think; therefore I am, my reason is there. And in reason certain truths reveal themselves to me. But my reason never recognizes all truth, but always only individual truths. These individual truths can only come from the being in whom all truth is, from God. So there must be a divine being. My reason proves this to me. But my reason gives me only parts of the truth; in revelation lies the highest truth. Thomas Aquino is a comprehensive thinker who processes all the knowledge of his time in an amazingly perceptive way. One must not imagine that this Christian philosopher was hostile to the knowledge of nature and reason. Nature was for him the one source of truth; revelation, however, the other. In his opinion, everything in the world comes from God. Also the natural phenomena are an outflow of the divine being. When we research about nature, we research with our thinking about the deeds of God. But we cannot penetrate to the highest deeds of God with our humanly weak thinking. According to Thomas Aquinas, we can still prove with our reason that there is a God; but we cannot learn anything from reason about the nature of God, about His Trinity, about the redemption of men through Christ, about the power of the sacraments, and so on; about this we are informed by revelation through the authority of the Church. It is not because these things have nothing at all to do with reason, Thomas thinks, that man cannot reach them by his reasoning, but only because human reason is too weak. A stronger reason could therefore also comprehend the revealed truths. This view is presented in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages.\nGerman mysticism took a different path than scholasticism to reach the truth. The most important mystics are: Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Heinrich Suso, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius, They form the forerunners of the newer world views insofar as they did not start from an external authority, but wanted to search for the truth in the soul of man and in the phenomena of nature. Not an external Christ can, in their opinion, show man the way to his goal, but only the spiritual forces within man show this way. \"The physician must go through the exams of nature,\" says Paracelsus, to point out that in nature itself is the source of truth. And Angelus Silesius emphasizes that not apart from the things of nature is a divine entity, but that God is in nature. How nature itself is the divine and creates as the divine, he expresses in beautiful sentences, such as, \"I know that without me God cannot live a nu; if I become too not, he must give up the ghost from need.\" God has no life apart from things, but only in things. Jakob Böhme's world view is also completely dominated by such a mental image.\nIt is evident from scholasticism that it was always striving to establish a harmony between reason and revelation. This could not be done without pretentious logic, without the most subtle conclusions. The mystics wanted to free themselves from such conclusions. The highest thing that man can know seems to them impossible to be based on logical subtleties, it must be revealed clearly and directly in nature and in the human mind.\nLuther also started from similar feelings. He was less concerned with what mattered to the mystic: he wanted to save the divine revelation above all from the contradiction of reason. He tried to achieve this, in contrast to the scholastics, by saying: Reason has no right at all to decide in matters of faith. Reason should deal with the explanation of world phenomena; it has nothing to do with the truths of faith. The revealed word is the source of faith. Reason has nothing in common with this faith; it is none of its business. It cannot refute it, nor can it prove it. It stands firmly for itself. When reason approaches religious truths, there is only vain bickering and gossip. That is why Luther reviled Aristotle, on whose teachings the scholastics had relied when they wanted to give faith a foundation through reason. He says: \"This God-cursed Aristotle is a true devil, a ghoulish slanderer, a wicked sycophant (slanderer), a prince of darkness, a beast, an ugly deceiver of mankind, almost destitute of all philosophy, an open and acknowledged liar, a lecherous goat.\" You can see what we are dealing with. Aristotle had wanted to reach the highest truths through human thinking; Luther wanted to secure these highest truths once and for all before processing them through reason. That is why he also calls reason \"the devil's whore, which can do nothing but incinerate and desecrate what God speaks and does.\" We see Luther's mental images still continuing today in the same form, even if modern theology puts a progressive cloak around them. In the much praised \"Essence of Christianity\" by Adolf Harnack, we read: \"Science is not able to give meaning to life.... Religion, namely love of God and neighbor, is what gives meaning to life.... Jesus' real greatness is that he led people to God.... The Christian religion is eternal life in the midst of time.\"\nShortly after Luther's appearance, reason, which he reviled, achieved one victory after another. Copernicus established his new view of the motion of the heavenly bodies. Kepler established the laws according to which the planets move around the sun; Galileo pointed the telescope out into unmeasured celestial spaces and thus gave nature the opportunity to reveal a wealth of facts on its own. Through such advances, natural science had to gain confidence in itself and in reason. Galileo reflects the feelings that settled in a thinker of that time. One believed now no longer to work in the sense of Aristotle, if one held on to what he had asserted with his limited knowledge. This is what the Middle Ages did. Now one was of the opinion that one creates in the spirit of Aristotle, if one, like him, directed the view into the nature, It is golden words which spoke in this respect Galilei. \"You always have it\" - he says - \"with your Aristotle, who cannot speak. But I tell you that if Aristotle were here, he would either be convinced by us, or refute our reasons and teach us better. ... Philosophy is written in that greatest book which is continually open before our eyes, I mean the universe, but which cannot be understood unless one has first understood the language and learned the signs in which it is written.\" Giordano Bruno is one of those spirits of this flourishing thought, who was able to build up an explanation of the world in the sense of the view of nature, but who besides that completely adhered to the traditional dogmas, without giving an account of how one can be united with the other.\nIf human thinking did not want to deny itself, if it did not want to be pushed into a completely subordinate position, it could only tread the path again in a new way, which the Greek world views had already sought. It had to seek to penetrate out of itself to the highest truths.\nRené Descartes (Cartesius) was one of the first who made an attempt. His way has much similarity with that of Augustine. Descartes also started from the doubt of all truth. And also he said to himself: Even if I can doubt about everything, I cannot doubt that I am. I think when I doubt; if I did not think, I could not doubt. But if I think, then I am. \"I think, therefore I am\" (cogito, ergo sum), that is the famous principle of Descartes. And from this basic truth Descartes seeks to ascend to the higher knowledge. He says to himself: What I see so clearly and distinctly, as that I am myself, must also be equally true. - And now a peculiar phenomenon occurs with him. The Christian mental images of God, soul and immortality, which a centuries-long education has inculcated in the adventurous mankind, he believes to find in his reason as certain truths as the knowledge that he is himself. These essential components of the old theology reappear there as alleged truths of reason. We even find in Descartes the old conception of the soul again. He thinks of this soul as an independent spiritual being, which only makes use of the body. We have met such an idea in Aristotle. The animals have, according to Descartes, nothing of a soul. They are automata. Man has a soul which has its seat in the brain and interacts with the soulless body through the pineal gland. We see in Descartes an endeavor which is also present in the scholastics, namely to want to prove the \"highest truths\" brought from the old tradition by reason. Only the scholastics openly admit that they want this, while Descartes believes to draw all proofs purely from reason itself. So Descartes apparently proved from reason what came only from religion. This disguised scholasticism still prevailed for a long time; and in Germany we have in Leibniz and in Wolff its most important representatives. Leibniz saves the old conception of the soul by making everything a kind of independent animate beings. These do not come into being and do not pass away. And he saves the conception of God by ascribing to it that it brings all beings into a harmonious interaction. Again and again the old religious mental images appear as alleged truths of reason. This is also the case with Wolff. He distinguishes sensual truths, which are gained by observation, and higher knowledge, which reason draws from itself. But these higher truths, seen in the light, are nothing else than the old truths of revelation gained by mutilation and sifting. No wonder that reason, in proving such truths, relied on highly questionable concepts which could not stand up to closer critical examination.\nSuch a critical examination of the process of proving human reason was undertaken by the English thinkers Locke, David Hume, and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Locke examined human cognition and believed to find that we can come to knowledge only by observing the processes of nature itself. Hume now asked what kind of knowledge these were. He said to himself: If I observe today that the heat of the sun is the cause of the heating of the stone: have I a right to say that it will always be so? If I perceive a cause and then an effect: may I say, that cause will always and necessarily have this effect? No, I am not allowed to. I see the stone fall to the earth and perceive that it makes a cavity in the earth. That it must be so, that it could not be also differently, of it I can assert nothing. I see certain processes and also get used to seeing them in a certain context. But whether such a connection really exists, whether there are laws of nature which can tell me something real about the connection of things, I know nothing about it. Kant, who had lived in the mental images of Wolff's world view until his manhood, was shaken in all his convictions when he got to know the writings of Hume. He had not doubted before that reason could prove eternal truths; Hume had shown that even in the case of simple truths there could be no question of proof, but that we accept everything we believe only out of habit. Should there really be no eternal truths, Kant asked himself. There must be such. He did not doubt that the truths of mathematics, for example, must always and necessarily be true. Nor did he doubt that something like the following must be eternally valid: every effect has a cause. But Hume convinced him of this, that these findings could not be eternally true, if we had gained them from observation from outside. For observation can only tell us what has always been; but not whether this must always be so. Kant found a way out. He said: it does not depend at all on the things in nature how they appear to us. It depends solely on ourselves. I am set up in such a way that for me \"twice two must be four\"; I am set up in such a way that for me every effect must have a cause. May it therefore happen outside, in the \"thing in itself\", as it may always be, may there once be the things in such a way that \"twice two three\" is, another time that \"twice two five\" is; all this cannot come to me. I can only perceive that \"twice two four\" is, consequently everything appears to me in such a way that \"twice two four\" is. I can only link an effect to a cause; consequently everything appears to me as if effects were always linked to causes. Whether also in the \"thing in itself\" causes are connected with effects, I don't know. I am like afflicted with blue glasses. May the things outside have whatever colors, I know in advance that everything will appear to me in a blue color tone. How the \"things in themselves\" are, I do not know; I only know how they appear to me. Since God, immortality and freedom of the human will cannot be observed at all, do not appear, human thinking, reason cannot make out anything about these things. They do not concern reason. But do they therefore not concern man at all? So Kant asks himself. They concern man very much, he answers. But one cannot understand their existence; one must believe it. I know that I should do my duty. A categorical imperative speaks in me: Thou shalt. So I must also be able to do it. At least I have to believe that I can. And for this belief I need another. I myself cannot give the necessary emphasis to the performance of my duty. I cannot arrange the world in such a way that it corresponds to what I must regard as moral world order. Therefore there must be a God who determines this moral world order. He also gives my soul immortality, so that in eternal life it can enjoy the fruits of its duties, which can never be granted to it in this transient, imperfect life. One sees, with Kant everything reappears as faith what knowledge can never reach. Kant achieved in a different way something similar to what Luther aimed at in his way. Luther wanted to exclude knowledge from the objects of faith. Kant wanted the same thing. His faith is no longer Bible faith; he speaks of a \"religion within the limits of mere reason.\" But the cognition, the knowledge, should be limited only to the phenomena; about the objects of faith they should have no say. Kant has rightly been called the philosopher of Protestantism. He has himself best described what he thinks he has achieved with the words: \"I had therefore to abolish knowledge in order to make room for faith.\" Knowledge, then, in Kant's sense, is to deal only with the subordinate world which gives no meaning to life; what gives meaning to life are objects of faith which no knowledge can approach.\nWhoever wants to save faith can do it with the weapons of Kant's worldview; for knowledge has no power - in the sense of this view - to make out anything about the highest truths. The philosophy of the 19th century is in many of its currents under the influence of the Kantian thoughts. One can so comfortably clip the wings of knowledge with them; one can deny the right of thinking to have a say about the highest things. One can say, for example: What does natural science want? It can give only subordinate wisdom to the best. Kant, whom we like to call the great reformer of philosophy, has proved once and for all that knowledge is limited, subordinate, that it cannot give meaning to life. The world views of the present, which refer to such self-mutilation of knowledge, have not even penetrated to the standpoint of scholasticism, which at least felt obliged to bring about a harmony between knowledge and faith. Du Bois-Reymond even put a scientific cloak around this point of view in his famous lecture: \"On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature\". 3.\nAnother 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.\nGoethe 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.\nWhat 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.\nThus 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.\nAnd 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.\nJohann 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.\nThe 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.\nWhat 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.\nThe 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.\nThe 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."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-2",
+    "title": "William Shakespeare",
+    "date": "6 May 1902",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/Singles/19020506p02.html",
+    "book_title": "",
+    "content": "ACCOMPANYING NOTE: Friends who heard that there existed notes of a lecture on Shakespeare given by Dr. Steiner in 1902 at the Workmen's School in Berlin, expressed the wish to read these notes. They were taken down by Frl. Johanna Mücke, who did not know shorthand, so that they do not claim to be complete. Their 7 pages of typescript may correspond to about 25 typescript pages of the original text of the lecture. But important points emerge even from these incomplete notes.\n— Marie Steiner\nTranslator Unknown Revised by Frank Thomas Smith\nAccording to a remark by the famous writer Georg Brandes, we should include Shakespeare in the German classics. And if we consider the enormous influence Shakespeare has had on Goethe, schiller and the development of German literature in general since he was rediscovered in the middle of the eighteenth century, especially through Lessing, we must agree with that remark – especially in view of the excellent translations of his work by Schlegel and Tieck.\nA legend has arisen about Shakespeare and whole libraries have been written about each of his works. Academics have given many interpretations of his plays, and finally a number of writers have decided that an uneducated actor could not have produced all the thoughts which they discovered in Shakespeare's works, and they became addicted to the hypothesis that not William Shakespeare, the actor of the Globe Theatre, could have written the plays which bear his name, but some other highly learned man, for example Lord Francis Bacon of Verulam, who in view of the low estimation of literary activity at that time, borrowed the actor's name. These suppositions are based on the fact that no manuscripts written by Shakespeare's hand have ever been found; they are also based upon a notebook discovered in a London library with single passages in it which are supposed to correspond with certain passages in Shakespeare's plays. But Shakespeare's own works bear witness that he is their author. His plays reveal that they were written by a man who had a thorough knowledge of the theatre and the deepest understanding for theatrical effects.\nThat Shakespeare himself did not publish his plays was simply in keeping with the general custom at his time. Not one of his plays was printed during his lifetime. They were carefully kept under wraps; people were to come to the theatre and see the plays there, not read them at home. Prints which appeared at that time were pirated editions, based on notes taken during the performances, so that the texts did not completely correspond to the original versions, but were full of errors and mutilations.\nThese partial omissions and mistakes led certain researchers to claim that Shakespeare's plays, as they were then available, were not works of art of any special value and that originally they must have existed in quite a different form. One of these researchers is Eugen Reichel, who thinks that the author of Shakespeare's plays was a man with a certain definite worldview. But such opinions are contradicted by the fact that the plays, in the form in which they now exist, exercise such an extraordinary influence. We see this great effect in plays that have undoubtedly been mutilated, for example in Macbeth . The hold of Shakespeare's plays on his audience was proved by a performance of Henry V under the direction of Neuman-Hofer at the inauguration of the Lessing Theatre. It did not fail to produce a powerful impression in spite of an extremely bad translation and poor acting.\nShakespeare's plays are above all character dramas. The great interest which they arouse does not so much lie in the action, as in the wonderful development of the individual characters. The poet conjures up before us a human character and unfolds his thoughts and feelings in the presentation of an individual personality.\nThis artistic development, which culminated in Shakespeare, was made possible by the preceding phase of cultural development: the Renaissance. Shakespeare's character-dramas could only arise as a result of the higher estimation of the individual during the Renaissance. During the early middle ages we find, even in Dante and in spite of his strong personality, the basic expression of the Christian ideas of that time. The Christian type of his time, not the individual human personality, appeared in the foreground. This was the general conception. The Christian principle had no interest in the individual personality. But little by little a new worldview aroused interest in the Individual human being. Only gradually did a new interest in the individual arise by means of the different viewpoint.\nThe fact that Shakespeare's fame spread so quickly proves that he found an audience keenly interested in the theatre, that is to say, with a certain understanding for the representation of the personality as offered by Shakespeare. Shakespeare's chief aim was to describe individual characters, and he was far from presenting to his audience an ethical or moral idea. For example, the idea of tragic guilt, as found in Schiller's dramas, who thought that he had to encumber his hero with it in order to justify his downfall, does not exist in Shakespeare's plays. He simply allows the events to take their course consistently, uninfluenced by the idea of guilt and atonement. It would be difficult to find a concept of guilt in this sense in any of his plays.\nShakespeare also did not intend to present a certain idea, not jealousy in Othello or ambition in Macbeth , no, simply the definite characters of Othello, Macbeth, or Hamlet. Just because he did not burden his characters with theories was he able to create such great ones. He was thoroughly acquainted with the stage, and this practical knowledge enabled him to develop his action in such a way as to thrill an audience. In the whole literature of the world there are no plays which are so completely conceived from the standpoint of the actor. This is a clear proof that Shakespeare, the actor , has the merit of having written these plays.\nShakespeare was born in Stratford in 1564. His father was in fairly good circumstances, so that his son was able to attend the Latin grammar school in his hometown. There are many legends about Shakespeare's youth. Some say that he was a poacher and led an adventurous life. These things have been adduced against his authorship, yet these very experiences could only enrich his dramatic creation. Even the fact that in spite of his good education he was not encumbered with higher academic study, gave him the possibility to face things more freely and in a far more unprejudiced way. The poet's adventurous nature explains to some extent some of the greatest qualities in his plays: the bold flight of his fantasy, his sudden transformations in the action, his passion and daring, all bear witness to a life full of movement and color.\nIn 1585, when Shakespeare's financial conditions were no longer in a flourishing state, he went to London. There he began his theatrical career in the most menial way, by holding the horses of the visitors while they were enjoying the performance. He then became supervisor of a number of such boys who had to hold the horses' reins, and was at last admitted to the stage. In 1592 he played his first important role.\nHis fame soon began to spread — both as an actor and as a dramatist — and his conditions improved, so that in 1597 he was able to buy a house in Stratford. After he became part-owner of the Globe Theatre he was a wealthy man.\nThe plays written during Shakespeare's first period: Love's Labour Lost, As You Like It, etc., do not differ so greatly from the plays of his contemporaries, of Marlowe and others; their expressive power, their purity and naturalness were moreover impaired by a certain artificial note which was the fashion in those days. The great character-plays, which were to establish his fame for all time, followed: Othello, Hamlet , Macbeth , King Lear , Julius Caesar .\nSome of Shakespeare's biographers and commentators wish to deduce from certain of his later plays troubled experiences which embittered him. But in Shakespeare's case this is difficult to establish, because his identity withdraws behind his characters. They do not voice his thoughts, but they all think and act in accordance with their own disposition and character.\nIt is consequently useless to ask what Shakespeare's own standpoint may have been on certain difficult questions. For it is not Shakespeare, but Hamlet who broods over the problem of “ to be, or not to be ”, who recoils from his father's ghost, just as Macbeth recoils from the witches. Whether Shakespeare believed in ghosts and witches, whether he was a churchgoer or a freethinker, is not the point at all: He simply asked himself: how should a ghost or a witch appear on the stage so as to produce a strong effect upon the audience? The fact that this effect is undiminished today proves that Shakespeare was able to answer this question.\nWe should not forget that the modern stage is not favourable to the effect which Shakespeare's plays can produce. The importance which is now attributed to props, costumes, the frequent changes of scenery, etc. diminish the effect which is to be produced by the characters in the plays — for this remains the chief thing. In Shakespeare's time when a change of scenery was simply indicated by a notice-board, when a table and a chair sufficed for the furniture of a royal palace, the effect produced by the characters must have been much greater than today.\nWhereas in the modern theater so much depends on scenery, props, etc., when the playwright usually gives a detailed description of the scenery so that the effect of his plays may be handicapped by bad staging, Shakespeare's plays leave a strong impression, even when performed badly.\nAnd when a times comes in which we again see the essential more than is the case today, will the effect of Shakespeare's art be ever greater: through the power of characterization which remains alive and unequaled through the centuries."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-3",
+    "title": "On Roman History",
+    "date": "19 Jul 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19040719c01.html",
+    "book_title": "Philosophy, History and Literature",
+    "content": "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.\nAnd 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.\nSo 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.\nWe 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?\nThere 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.\nWe 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.\nWe 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.\nNow 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.\nNow 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.\nAnd 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.\nThere 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.\nBut 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.\nChristianity 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.\nThat'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.\nNow 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.\nIn 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.\nBut 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.\nThis 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.\nNow 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.\nAnd 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.\nThe 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.\nIt 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.\nThen 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.\nAn 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.\nNow 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.\nWhen 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:\nThe old overthrows, time changes,\nAnd new life blossoms from the ruins."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-4",
+    "title": "Lecture I",
+    "date": "18 Oct 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041018p01.html",
+    "book_title": "The History of the Middle Ages",
+    "content": "Goethe has said that the best thing about History is the enthusiasm it arouses, leading to encouragement to like deeds. In a certain sense all knowledge and all understanding have their true value only when they emerge into life. In History, it is necessary to look very far back in order to find the causes of later developments. Just as, to understand individual branches of external evolution — for instance, in building of bridges and roads — we must cling to the fact that these are the fruits of achievements in individual sciences, such as Mathematics and Physics, so also we see everywhere in actual History the fruits of earlier happenings. What comes to expression in our lifetime has its origin in far back ages.\nWe are now going to study a section of time, upon which many do not care to look back, a time which they would prefer to delete from History as “the dark Middle Ages.” And yet in it we are facing an important section of History — barbaric peoples, knowing nothing of Civilisation and Art, appear on the arena. These tribes, pressed back by the Mongols from their dwelling-place in the Russia of to-day, pushed on far towards the west. We will follow the struggles and destinies of these peoples; then our path will lead us on to the discovery of America, to that point of time at which the Middle Ages merge into the modern epoch, to the time of the great discoveries, when that invention took place which probably had the deepest significance of all, the invention of Printing; the time in which Copernicus gave us a new picture of the world. This evolution led mankind from the folk-migrations to the discoveries of the modern age.\nIt is much more difficult to point out, in History, the relation between cause and effect, than it is in Chemistry or Physics; for cause and effect often lie far apart.\nNot until to-day have men regarded mutual tolerance for the various confessions of faith, as a requisite condition of culture. Yet, as early as the 3rd century before Christ, there existed in India a reciprocal respect and tolerance for the most diverse faiths, as a monument of King Asoka proves. The Christian feeling which sprang up later, in the Roman Empire, shed its influence over the whole of the Middle Ages; but its origin lay neither in the Roman Empire nor in Germania, but in a closed order of the little Jewish race the Essenes. Before we can understand what influence the Middle Ages have upon us, we must first grasp what it is that flows to us from them. An eminent Roman writer, Tacitus, has preserved for us in his Germania , a picture of that race which settled in the Germany of to-day. He describes them as separate tribes, similar in speech, and, though regarding themselves as different races, yet appearing very much alike to the outsider. He found out what was common to them all and gave them the general name of Germani.\nNow if we examine the folk-soul of these Germanic tribesmen, we are confronted by the difference between them and the Greeks and Romans. In the construction of their soul-qualities, there is an important chronological difference. Greek culture with its incomparable Art, marks a particular point in human evolution. We saw that before the conquest by the invading Hellenes, there was in Greece a very ancient race, something like the later Germani; these were the Pelasgi, who lived in a community of freedom. After the immigration of the Hellenes, we find two strata of population, victors and vanquished, the contrast of free and unfree. From the folk-migrations and the conquests sprang Greek authority. Hence it follows that only a small section of the population had any share in the assets of culture. Another result was the low value set upon work; even artistic work was considered unworthy of the free Greek citizen. It was through this contempt for work that Greece went under. This culture of the Greeks, unrivalled in many points; was a culture only possible among conquerors. The Roman Empire is a history of continual conquests; when it could conquer nothing more, it went to pieces.\nThe distinguishing Germanic characteristic impressed itself, in all its component parts, before conquest, and did not allow itself to be subjugated by contact with other races. Its evloution stood firm in face of conflict.\nThus we see the development of the folk-spirit completed in the Greeks after , in the Romans during and in the Germanic before , the great historical struggles. If we are to study their characteristics, we must distinguish more accurately these racial groups in Central Europe. Three races come under consideration. In Spain, France, Ireland and Southern Germany, we find, first of all the ancient race of Celts. They were driven from their original dwelling-place by the Germani. Then came the Slavs, from the East, and forced the German tribes farther back. Thus we find in the Germani, hemmed in by the other two races, a strong intermingling of Celts and Slavonic blood. And this mixture of the Celtic and Slavonic element, influenced the whole culture of the Middle Ages.\nWhen we look back into the far past we see a great and remarkable culture of the ancient Celts. Even to this day the Celtic blood shows itself as active, energetic, mentally alert, inclined to revolutionary impulses. To the Celtic race we owe magnificent poems, songs and scientific ideas. It was the Celts who gave the stimulus for the legends elaborated by German poets in the Middle Ages — Roland, Tristan, Parsifal, etc. This remarkable race has almost disappeared, either pressed farther westward, or amalgamated with the Germanic.\nThe outstanding features of the Germanic character are courage, the roaming spirit, and a strong feeling for Nature. In it are developed the domestic and martial virtues, practical efficiency and activity directed to useful ends. Hunting and cattle-rearing formed the chief occupations of the Germani; they had only a few simple poems, derived from older races. In its fundamental qualities, the Germanic character remained as it was in the age of barbarism. Within the Germanic element rise the driving forces of a contrasted evolution. A noticeable change took place during the Middle Ages. Greece had developed its sublime Art, Rome its life of Rights, and the concept of the state. The simple Germanic conception of law was based on quite different premises. In Rome, judgment was given on a basis of property-relationships, especially with reference to land or realty. The complicated ideas of justice in the Roman State were derived from the endeavor to bring harmony between the free citizen and the land-owner. All the contention between plebians and patricians, the fighting of the Gracchi, even the party-struggles of the later Republic, were struggles for the rights of the free citizen as opposed to those who gained possession of power because they were in possession of land. Nominally, equal rights in the State pertained to every Roman citizen. Yes, even in the later epoch of the Empire, every emperor possessed nominal rights in the State, because he united in his person, the rights of all free citizens, and exercised them in their stead.\nSuch factitious ideas were alien to the simple Germanic conception of justice. The special value of free citizenship met with no legal recognition. What evolved from these points of view was club-law, the right of the stronger; he was the mightiest who could make his right felt by force. To begin with, it was physical strength which asserted itself; then everyone must submit and adapt himself to the stronger. The fruit, however, of what was prepared in the Germanic age, appeared later as the right of the free personality, conditioned by nothing but self-acquired proficiency. This is clearly marked in the founding of the Cities. This development of the cities, which took place in the 11th century throughout the whole of Western Europe, presents a significant phenomenon. Whence did they arise? They were founded by those who, feeling themselves oppressed by the land-owners, sought a place where they could enjoy, undisturbed, what they owed to their own activity, to their personal activity. The free citizen of ancient Rome relied upon his title; his rights depended upon it. In the Middle Ages, the title of citizen was of no value; only that counted, which a man acquired for himself. The struggles for independence and freedom which the princes and knights carried on, were merely the expression of a struggle for free personality. It was not like this either in ancient Greece or in ancient Rome. It was a significant transition stage.\nWhy then did people gather together in the Cities? The reason was, in the first place, a material consideration; they wished to be free from oppression, in order to direct their activity to what was useful, to material gain.\nAnd it was from this city-culture — but not from these new foundations — that there arose in Italy, on the scene of an ancient dying civilisation, the mighty poet-personality of the Middle Ages — Dante. In the Germanic cities, the first inventions were practical: the compass, gunpowder, and finally, the fruit-bearing event of the invention of printing. All this, which led to a complete transformation of conditioins, was born out of the practical achievements of man. At first sight, that may seem very far-fetched, but — as already emphasised — cause and effect in History lie far asunder. An example may illustrate this.\nIn 1846, Franz Palecky, the Czech historian, referred to the reform movement of the Middle Ages, in his work on the Czech race in the 15th century. Long before the so-called Reformation, this movement was tentatively considering a re-organisation of the Church. Dealing with the Hussite movement most sympathetically, Polacky, who had himself taken an active part in the Revolution of 1848, called particular attention to these currents. In a quite original way, he pointed out in them what had been developed in the days of city-culture. It is a common property of the Celtic, Germanic and Slavonic tribes. If we study the sagas and songs of these peoples, we understand it. They are distinguished form the sagas of ancient Greece and Rome in that they depict what the human heart can suffer, and what redeems it.\nThis is the feeling for tragedy . Among the Greeks and Romans, the hero of the story was he who was externally victorious, not he, who maintained his soul in uprightness. The heart of the people was always with him who was outwardly favoured by fortune. It was different with the Germanic peoples. The heart of the Germanic and Slavonic races beat for the heroes who externally failed, but whose souls stood firm. They lived in the soul, in the spirit. Heroes like Siegfried or Roland, or the king's son Mark, were extolled in the poems of these races. It is not to the external victories of these heroes, but ih their courage in suffering and failure, their unbowed spirit, that homage is paid. Everything gives place to the rectitude of spirit and soul. In the Imperium Romanum we see courage and consciousness of justice flourishing; in Greece we see Art; but with the Germani, it is the life of the soul that confronts us. They had no images of their gods; no splendid statues, such as the Greeks had. Their souls worked out the images of their gods; deep within their hearts they formed their God.\nFrom this tendency of the races sprang, too, the thought of reformation. To be themselves collaborators in what faith was to be — that is what these people desired. A hundred years before Luther, Wycliffe had introduced a reform movement in England. The folk-spirit demanded that men should take the Bible into their own hands. From this spirit the Huss movement also arose. As far back as the early Middle Ages there were already preliminary efforts in this direction. The Emperor Henry II, of Saxon lineage, who was later canonised by the Catholic Church, demanded an ecclesia non romana . Militz, the inadequately appreciated savant, wrote his book on Antichrist , while pining in a prison in Prague. That which came to light in such demands and movements — the emancipation from external coercion, the spiritual deepening — was claimed by Palacky for the Slavs: he sees the thought of human kindness, as expressed by Herder, represented in the Fraternal Fellowship , developed on Bohemian soil. It lies deep in the nature of the Germanic races to regard an untrammelled organisation as the ideal.\nIt was neither after, nor during, conquest, that the Germanic character was formed; but the quality which marked it before this time, was maintained throughout this stage, and eventually developed to these ideals. The thought of freedom was evolved during the Middle Ages in spite of all the counter-currents which gave this period the name of “the dark Middle Ages.” If to many to-day the Middle Ages appear as a gloomy epoch, yet it was in the Middle Ages that that was developed which later, the poets sought, namely, the consciousness of freedom , a consciousness for which the 18th century fought bitterly, and with which the struggles of the present day are concerned.\nWe must free ourselves from the state of coercion which many are still bound to-day, though the consciousness that, as regards the feeling of freedom, all men are equal, has spread more and more. Men have grasped that by right no man can be a slave or a bondsman. To-day man feels himself free by right . But another form of unfreedom, material unfreedom, has persisted. In ancient Greece, the oppressed, the vanquished, the slaves, were unfree. Unfree in ancient Rome were those who had no claim to citizenship, no share in the State. In the Middle Ages men were made unfree by physical force. None of these forms could be maintained; economic unfreedom alone persists.\nMore and more clearly has the striving for complete freedom of personality shown itself. The ancient Greek valued distinction or race ; the Roman, distinction of person ; modern man attaches value to capitalism , to a show of wealth. Thus evolution points to the fall of more and more of those barriers which shut the personality off from the outside. Then the ground becomes free for the new ideal. History teaches us that the free man acquires a new value from out the spirit . The man who fulfils the ideal will be he who is freed from all these forms of oppression, he who, released from earthly gravity, can direct his gaze upwards. Only then will Hegel's words become wholly true: “History is the progress of humanity to consciousness of freedom.”"
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-5",
+    "title": "Lecture II",
+    "date": "25 Oct 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041025p01.html",
+    "book_title": "The History of the Middle Ages",
+    "content": "The picture of Central Europe has altered fundamentally between, say, the year 1 and the 6th century A.D. This change involves a complete replacement of the peoples who lived on the Weichsel, the Oder and the Elbe, by others; hence it is very difficult for us to picture those races, to learn anything about their customs and way of living. We must find a way of our own to form such a picture. Tacitus, in his Germania , gives descriptions of the country at that time. No other records have been preserved to us of those days, and we must enlist the help of the North Germanic legends to complete the account. What Tacitus says about these races is very significant, in contrast to the Roman conception of the conditions of those days. In the opinion of Tacitus, these peoples were the original inhabitants of that land, for he cannot imagine that any other races would be able to get on in that inhospitable regiion. He mentions the tribes which dwell on the Rhine, the Lippe, the Weser, the Danube and in Brandenburg; these alone are known to him. He tells of characteristic features in them, and on account of their similarity groups them together under the name Germani. They, however, felt themselves to be different tribes, and the struggles with the Romans, they were called may different names, of which only a few, such as the Suevi, Longobards, Frisians, etc. have been preserved to later days\nThey were descended originally from one, Tuisco, to whom they pay divine homage, expressing it in songs of battle. Tuisco's son was Mannus, after whose three sons they named their chief tribes: the Ingavones, Istavones and Herminones If we compare this information of Tacitus' with the myths of another Aryan race, we find in Sanscrit, the sacred language of the Hindus, the same disignation Manu, for their supreme leader. This indicates a tribal relationship. Indeed, we can follow like deities in all the Indo-Germanic tribes. Thus Tacitus relates that the hero of Greek legend, Hercules, was also honoured by the Germani, bearing among them the name of Irmin. We know that there existed among the southern Indo-Germanic tribes a legend which found artistic elaboration in Greece: The story of Odysseus. Tacitus found, in the neighbourhood of the Rhine, a place of worship dedicated to Odysseus and his farther Laertes. So we see that the culture of the Germani at this epoch was akin to the culture we meet with in Greece in the 8th and 9th centuries B.C. Thus in Greece we see later the development of a culture which in Germany has remained stationary at a lower level.\nAll this points to an original relationship between these races. The peoples who lived, later in Germany, Greece and Russia, probably had their earlier homeland north of the Black Sea. From there one tribe wandered to Greece, another to Rome, and a third towards the west; the original culture of all these peoples was maintained in this form by the Germani, and further developed by the Celts. Tacitus tells us nothing of the manners and customs of that remarkable race. By the songs and sagas collected later in Iceland, in the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda , we must conclude that what that race produced, persisted there. Tacitus tells us further of the customs of the Germans in their tribal assemblies, which, however, we must picture as deliberations of very small communities. To these assemblies came all the warriors of that province; the consultations were carried on to the accompaniment of beer and mead, and we are told that the old Germans made their resolutions when drunk in the evening, but revised them next morning when they were sober, and not until then were the decisions valid. As we learn from the Iliad , the same custom existed among the Persians. So we must conclude that there was an original Aryan stem, and hence a relationship between all these races.\nAmong the Germanic races in the north, a great similarity is specially evident in the characteristic forms of their religion, which do, indeed, fundamentally resemble those of the south, and yet show a much greater conformity with those of the Persians. According to the northern Germani, there were originally two kingdoms, separated from each other by an abyss: a kingdom of fire, Muspelheim, and a kingdom of ice, Niflheim. The sparks which flew over from Muspelheim, gave rise, in the abyss, to the first race of giants, of whom Ymir was the most outstanding. Then arose the Cow, Audhumbe, which was overlaid by the ice, and brought forth a mighty human form. From this human form sprang the Gods: Woten, Wile and We, whose names mean Reason, Will and Kindness. This second race of Gods was called Asen. Its descent was traced to the first race of giants.\nHere too there occurs an important connection between the languages, for Asuras, the name of the Persian gods, suggests the sound Asen, again indicating a relationship connecting all these races. We find another important indication in an ancient Persian formula or poem of exorcism, which has come down to us. It points to changes in the mind of the race, to ancient Gods, deposed and supplanted by others. The service of the Devas was forsworn, the service of the Asuras confirmed. Here appears similarity to the giants, who were overcome by the Asen.\nMoreover, the North Germanic legend tells how the three Gods found an ash and an alder on the seashore, and from them created the human race. The Persian myth, too, makes the human race come forth from a tree. We find echoes of these myths among the Jews, in the story of the Tree of Life in Paradise. Thus we see, from Persia to Scandinavia, by way of Palestine, traces of similar mythical ideas.\nSo we have proved a common fundamental character among certain races. At the same time there are again differences between a southern and a northern branch of the common main stock. To the southern branch belong the Greeks, Latins, and Hindus; to the northern, the Persian and Germaninc tribes. Let us see then what sort of races we have to do with in Germany now. As they confront us, we are bound to believe that they have traits of character which the Greeks and Italians have long cast off, and indeed, the Greeks after , the Romans during the conquest of their empire; whereas these northern peoples developed their essential characteristics and qualities before that conquest. They were the original, unpolished qualities, which these races had preserved. They had not experienced that transition-stage, through which, in the meanwhile, the southern races had passed. Hence we have to do here with the clash of a race which has remained conservative, against one which, although related to it, has attained a greater height of culture.\nAt the time of the rise of Christianity, which was to acquire so great a significance for them, described by the Greeks in the works of Homer. They had not cooperated in the advance of culture and civilisation which lay between. In the first centuries A.D., Tacitus describes the Germani of the borderlands of the Danube, the Rhine and the Lippe. These races were characterised by the roving instinct, love of liberty, and delight in hunting and war. Domestic matters lay in the hands of women. Here we meet with a civilisation and a form of society which had long disappeared from among the Greeks, and could only be preserved where the several members of a tribe were still bound to one another by blood relationships. Hence teh many tribes. In those who were conscious of their derivation from the same family — for they were regularised families, not hordes — tribal kinship was evolved from the separate families. Thus the wars which they waged were almost always against foreign blood.\nTowards the end of the 4th, and during the 5th century, we see all these races compelled to change their places of abode, and to seek new ones.\nThe epoch of the folk migrations had begun. The Huns broke in and therewith knowledge faded from among the peoples living in the east — the Gepids, etc., and above all, the Goths. This race, divided into the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths, had already accepted Christianity. It is a race of special importance for us, just because of the way it apprehended Christianity. Whereas the Franks, who later spread Christianity from west to east, thrust it upon other races with force, the Goths were full of tolerance. The high level of culture which they had already attained is vouched for by the circumstances that we owe to a Gothic bishop, Ulfias or Wulfila, the first translation of the Bible, the so-called Silver Codex, which is preserved in Upsula.\nThese Goths, whose civilisation came from the east, held a different form of Christianity from those whose conversion issued later from the west. They were not like the Franks who, in the days of Charlemagne, thrust Christianity upon the Saxons by force of arms. (All these eastern Germanic tribes professed the Arian belief, a point of view which, at the Council of Nicea, was declared heretical and persecuted by the supporters of Athanasius).\nThe Arian Christians maintained that God dwells in the bosom of every man. Hence the Goths believed in the deification of man, as Christ, Who had gone before, showed to men. This viewpoint was allied with a deep cultivation of feeling. The Goths had the greatest possible tolerance for every other form of religion. No compromise was possible between two Christian creeds which were so different from each other. As absolute tolerance was a characteristic of these Goths; it never occurred to them to force a belief on anyone else; thus we are at once confronted with the difference in the way Charlemagne and Clovis, supporters of the Athanasian profession of faith, exploited Christianity for political purposes.\nThe Arians saw in Christ a man highly developed above all other men, but a man among men. Their Christ belonged to humanity and dwelt in the human breast. The Christ of the Athanasian Christians is God Himself , throned high above men.\nAthanasiaus won the victory, and the evolution of culture was essentially influenced by it.\nThe Germani were hemmed in on all sides by foreign races; in the south and west by the Romans and Gauls (Celto-Germanic tribes); while from the east new encroachments of peoples continually took place. The first Christian Germanic tribes had neer known anything but absolute tolerance; the Christian Franks brought in a compulsory Christianity. This led to a change of temperament. On the evolution of this section of the Germani depended essentially the further evolution of culture. A radical change of legal conditions had gradually come about.\nTo a certain extent calm and fixity set in with the end of the fifth century. Through continual reinforcements from the east, larger tribal communities had been formed from the above mentioned tribes, who were for ever attacking one another, and of whom even the names (Chatten, Frisians, etc.) have only in a few cases been preserved. Through the loosening of the old blood bonds, another motive for clinging together was created. In place of the blood bond, appeared the bond which allied a man with the ground and soil that he tilled.\nThe connection together of tribes became equivalent to their connection with places. The village community arose. It was no longer the consciousness of blood relationship, but the connection with the soil that bound several members together. This led to a metamorphosis of the conditions of property.\nOriginally all property was held in common and private property acquired prominence. Still, everything which could be common property (forest, pasturage, water, etc.) remained so, for the time being. Then an intermediate stage grew up between common and private property, the so-called “hide” of land. The use of this half-private, half-common property served as a basis to determine the so-called free inhabitants of the hide, the community; and in those early days, almost all the dwellers within these bounds were free.\nThis stands in stark contrast to actual private property: weapons, household utensils, garments, gardens, cattle, etc., everything which the individual has personally acquired. This limitation is expressed in the fact that private property is closely bound up with the personality of the possessor That is why a dead man had his weapons, horses, dogs, etc. buried with him in his grave. It is an echo of this ancient custom when, even today, at the funeral of a prince, his orders, crown, etc. are carried after him, and his horse is led behind.\nWith the Chinese, too, a race which in many ways shows similarity with the ancient Germani, a dead man has the objects which belonged to him personally, buried with him, a condition carried out today, at any rate with paper models.\nThus we see the transition from the tribal, to the village community, which has developed from certain relationships, from this we understand further metamorphoses. We understand why Tacitus does not speak of the Asen, but of Tuisco and his son Mannus. He speaks of races which have not yet reached to a higher level of culture. Other races came from the north, and brought with them ideas which they developed there. These fitted in to the higher stages of culture which had meantime been reached. How far does a man get with the ideas that confront us in Tuisco or Mannus? He remains with the human being, does not go beyond himself . It would have been useless to introduce the service of Wotan to these tribes. The service of Wotan goes out into the universal; man seeks his origin in the bosom of Nature. It was only in the later stage of civilisation that man could rise to this religious level. When he has settled down, he understands his connection with Nature. Thus we have seen how the primitive culture of the southern Germani was influenced from the north, and how, in the meantime, high civilisations had developed among related races in the south.\nWe shall see further on, under what conditions the southern culture was spread among the Germani. An interesting survey is presented to us there; the deep-seated kinship of different races. We see the external influences which alter the character. Cause and effect become clear to us.\nAnd so we learn to understand the present from the past. Eternal variability governs not only Nature, but History. How could we face the future with confident courage, if we did not know that the present also changes, that we can shape it to our liking, that here too the poet's words hold good?\nThe old gives way, Time alters all; And new life blossoms from the ruins."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-6",
+    "title": "Lecture III",
+    "date": "1 Nov 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041101p01.html",
+    "book_title": "The History of the Middle Ages",
+    "content": "It is only necessary to mention one of all the facts which speak to the same purpose, in order to see what far-reaching changes preceded the fifth century. At the end of the fourth century we find the Visigoths east of the Danube; a century later the map shows them in Spain. And just as this race travelled from one end of Europe to the other, so did many more. They penetrated into countries where they met with different civilisations, and adopted other customs. To understand the revolution which a hundred years produced in Central Europe, we must cast a glance back to the previous historical epochs. If we follow the records of the Romans, we find warlike tribes along the Rhine, whose main occupation, apart from fighting, was the chase. Farther east we find agriculture and cattle raising among the Germani; and farther still the Romans speak of the tribes in the northeast as of something nebulous and obscure.\nWe are told that this race, which dwelt by the sea, worshipped the Sun, believing that it saw the Sun goddess rising from the ocean. Of the Semnones, who lived in the Electorate of Bradenburg, it is told that their divine service was characterised by blood sacrifices. True, with them it was not, as a rule, human beings, but animals, that were offered up to the Gods. Nevertheless their sacrificial services bore a reputation for cruelty, which distinguished them from other tribes. And there would be much besides to relate concerning this epoch.\nThen followed a comparatively quiet time.\nGradually the frontiers of the Roman Empire were crossed by various tribes. To begin with, in the third century the Burgundians advanced against the Roman Empire in the southwest, and farther north the Franks, who invaded Gaul. Farther east, too, on the Danube, other tribes moved against the Roman Empire. Thus the Romans, with their highly developed culture, had to defend themselves againse those peoples. We find here a great difference in levels of culture. Among the Germani everywhere, a system of barter still prevailed, among the Romans money transactions had been developed. Trade among the Germani was a matter of exchange; trading with money was still unknown to them. We see the clash of highly developed culture with barbaric tribes.\nThen the Huns broke in. In the year 375 occurred the first clash with the Herulern and the Ostrogoths, whose dwelling place was on the Black Sea. They were forced westwards, and consequently the Visigoths were also obliged to break up their settlements. Where were they to go but into the Roman Empire, which they inundated as far as the Danube. Already the Roman Empire was split into an East and West Empire, the former with Byzantium, the latter with Rome, as its capital. The East Roman ruler assigned dwelling places to the Visigoths; but they nevertheless first had to fight for them at the battle of Adrianople. There, in that neighbourhood, Ulfils wrote his translation of the Bible. Soon, however, the Visigoths were obliged to resume their wanderings. Slavonic tribes followed in their footsteps, pressing them farther westward. Under their king Alarich, they conquered Rome, and, in the fifth century, founded the Visigothic Empire in Spain.\nThe Ostrogoths followed them, and likewise sought to establish a dwelling place in the domain of the Roman Empire. The Germanic tribe of Vandals conquered Spain, then sailed over to Africa, and, in the region where Carthage once stood, founded a Vandal Empire, and thence harassed Rome with incursions. Thus the whole character of these races is such, that into every part of the new configuration of Christian Rome, the Germanic races pressed. From this type of conquest new configurations of quite a special character arose.\nIn the domain of the former Gauls, rose a mighty empire — the empire of the Franks — which, for a whole century, imprinted its stamp on Central Europe. Within it, above all grew up what is commonly called Roman Christianity. Those other races — Goths, Vandals — who, in rapid triumphal marches, had subdued for themselves parts of the Roman Empire, soon disappeared again, completely, out of History. With the Franks we see a mighty empire extending over Europe. What is the reason for this?\nTo find that out, we must cast a glance at the way in which these tribes extended their empire. It was done in this way: a third, or two-thirds, of the region which they had invaded, was divided among the conquerors. Thus the leaders received great tracts of land, which they cultivated for themselves. For this work the conquered inhabitants were employed; a part of the population became slaves, or unfree. This was the policy of the Visigoths in Spain, the Ostrogoths in Italy. You may suppose that, under the existing circumstances where the population lived at a high level of culture, this mode of procedure caused great hardship and could not be permanently maintained.\nIt was different in Gaul.\nThere, there were great forests and uninhabited tracts of land. There, too, the conquered regions were divided, and large portions fell to the leaders, so that the leaders became great landowners, and rulers over the vanquished tribes. Here, however, they were not trammelled by already existing circumstances; there was room for expansion. And, although the leaders became rulers, circumstances made it possible for this to happen without great oppression. In the days before folk migrations, members of one tribe had, in essentials, resembled one another. Freedom was a common Germanic possession; in a certain sense, every man was his own master, responsible to no one, on his own land and soil. The independence and power of the leaders increased, because so many had become dependent on them.\nHence, they were in a position to protect themselves better; and small proprietors placed themselves under the protection of greater. Thus arose a protective relationship of the powerful towards the less powerful. Many small feuds were carried on by many small landowners who could not adequately protect themselves, in dependence upon more powerful protectors. Some swore fealty in case of war; others relinquished parts of their property, or paid tribute to their protectors. Such dependents were called vassals. Others held land under feudal tenure from the big proprietors, as payment for their service in case of war; this was the fief. The powerful warriors were feudal lords, the others were vassals. Thus, in the most natural way in the world, proprietary relationships grew up.\nThe invasions of the Goths had no lasting effect. Those peoples who had forced their way into civilised lands, came to nothing; their power was soon broken.\nIt was different in Gaul. Here, where extensive tracts had still to be cleared, the immigration of new tribal masses could only be welcomed, in the interest of culture. The great men in the Empire of the Franks were unimpeded in the cultivation of their racial character.\nThe Goths and Vandals were wiped out, they and all the Germanic tribes who came into the regions where industry was already developed. We see the Franks as independent of an industrial foundation; and the Franks gave their impress to the character of the ensuing age, especially because they provided a base upon which evolving Christianity was able to expand. Although the Visigoths were originally Aryan Christians, other ideas were engrafted into their belief; among the industrial assumptions which were foreign to their nature, that was developed which may be regarded as the stamp of materialistic conditions. It was not so among the Frankish tribes, where the Church was the great landowner. Undaunted by material considerations, these abbots, bishops, priests and theologians devoted themselves to the service of religion. Unalloyed, as it emanated from the nature of these men, the characteristic culture of this form of Christianity was developed. The spiritual strivings of the free ranks were encouraged by the influx of the Celtic element. The Celts, whose fiery blood again manifested itself, became the teachers and leaders of the spiritually less active Franks. From Scotland and Ireland came Celtic monks and priests in great numbers, to spread their faith among the Franks.\nAll this made it possible for Christianity to be, at that time, not a mirror of external conditions, but to develop freely, unconstrained by material considerations. The conditions of Central Europe were determined by Christianity. All the knowledge of antiquity was thus preserved by Christianity for the Germanic tribes. Aristotle gave the spiritual kernel, which Christianity sought to grasp. At that time there was no dependence on Rome. The Christian life could develop freely in the Empire of the Franks. Plato's world of ideas found entrance too into this spiritual life. This was brought about especially through the influence of Scottish monks, above all through Scotus Erigene in his work De Divisioni Naturae , a work which is well-known as indicating a high level of spiritual life. Thus we see how spiritual life was being formed, unhindered by external conditions. Spiritual currents received their characteristic independently of industrial conditions. Later when the material pressure increased they accepted, retrospectively, the character of these conditions; then, however, when they themselves joined them, they exercised influence on them in their turn.\nSeveral small kingdoms formed what we know as the Merovingian Empire, which later came under the power of one ruler.\nFrom the foregoing description you will see that southern Christianity was bound to be different from that with which it was later amalgamated. The Christianity of the Franks was comparatively independent, and could make use of political relationships, to its own advantage. The farther the Roman rule was pressed back, the more clerics came from among the Franks. Their education lagged far behind that of the other clergy; the learned priests and monks were all Celts.\nIn these centuries, therefore, the most divine tribes were gradually shaken up together; the invasion of the Huns gave rise to these changes While that which has been described was taking shape within the actual currents of civilisation, great struggles had been going on outside. But what we call the evolution of civilisation was not essentially affected by these external struggles.\nThe Huns had penetrated far to the west; if we are not blind to what the old legends relate, we know that they pushed as far as the south of France.\nIn the old heroic poem of Walther on der Vogelweide, handed down to us in a Latin translation, we are told how the princes of the Germanic tribes, the Burgundians and Franks, had to scourge the Huns, among them that Walther, son of the prince of a Germanic tribe, who ruled in Aquitania. This heroic song narrates the feats of Walther, Hagen and Gunther. In continuous succession followed incursions of the Huns, harassing the Germanic races far into the west, until eventually the Franks, the Goths and what was left of the Roman race, formed the force which opposed the Huns in battle on the Catalaunian Plain in the year 451. This is the first defeat that the Huns suffered. Their rule, however, which had weighed heavily upon the peoples, left no lasting impression.\nIn manners and customs the Huns were so alien to the people of Europe, that their whole type and form is described as something quite peculiar. An important point was that this race formed a compact unity; a submissiveness, amounting to idolatry, under their king, Attila, made them an irresistible terror to other races. After their defeat on the Catalaunian Plain, this army received its last decisive defeat through Leo the Great, Bishop of Rome, who withstood Attila, and induced him to retreat. Leo knew the power which Attila exercised over his people. But with all his power Attila did not know what was opposing him, namely, Christianity; therefore he bowed before it.\nThe rule of the Huns remained merely an episode; what came from the west made a much more lasting influence. After Attila's death in 453, his army soon collapsed. Neither was the rule of the Goths, Gepidae, or Vandals, of lasting duration; they found themselves hemmed in by conditions already settled, and were not able to maintain their own character. Things happened differently in France: the culture there proved faithful to the character of the Frankish tribe, and it may be seen how powerfully this race evolved. Later, however, we see too how this tribe forced other to accept Christianity. We see further that there existed nothing better calculated to develop material culture than Christianity; all sorts of culture forms received their stamp from external Christianity. And because they were able to maintain their free character, they provided a framework for mobile forms in which spiritual life could develop, and in this way the spiritual, industrial communities — monasteries, etc. — grew up. In process of time, however, spiritual and industrial culture were separated. Although the empire of Charlemagne considered itself a Christian empire, in spreading Christianity by force, it set itself in opposition to the spirit of Christianity. Hence Christianity was soon no longer suited to industrial life. The conditions of industrial life were felt to be oppressive — and thus the “free cities” originated.\nThis, in outline, is the evolution of spiritual and material evolution. You see that it was only when the spiritual currents no longer coincided with the material conditions, that this disparity found expression in a purely material culture, the city-culture. From these industrial formations grew out of material interests. The population which could not be supported on the land, pressed into the towns to find protection and security. Thus we see empires rising and falling, and new creations taking the place of old. We can, however, only understand their organisation, if we realise how the first model realm, the empire of the Franks, was formed. Not having pressed into already existing conditions, but going where space was offered for free expansion, this tribe had evolved its character and was able to develop its rule.\nThe tribes driven from their homes during the great folk migrations, were not only thoroughly mingled together, they were also newly constructed. Some had disappeared from History altogether, others had taken their place. This great metamorphosis was accomplished, not merely from outside, but still more in the deepest depth of their character. At the beginning of the epoch of the folk migrations, we see the various Germanic tribes asking a question of destiny. For the Goths, who had chosen for themselves a tolerant Christianity, this question signified extermination. For the Franks, confrontation with it under other freer, more favourable circumstances, it meant increase of power throughout the centuries. Whether or not for the good of all, we shall see in what follows."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-7",
+    "title": "Lecture IV",
+    "date": "8 Nov 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041108p01.html",
+    "book_title": "The History of the Middle Ages",
+    "content": "A common prejudice is expressed in the maxim: Human evolution moves forward in regular succession, the unfolding of historical events makes no leaps. This is connected with another prejudice; for we are also told that Nature makes no leaps. This is repeated over and over again; but it is untrue both for Nature and for History. We never see Nature making mighty progress without leaps. Her progress is not gradual; on the contrary, small processes are followed by important results, and the most important of all result from leaps. Many cases could be enumerated in which Nature advances in such a way, that we can observe a transition of forms into their exact opposite.\nIn History this is particularly important, because there we have two significant occurences, which gradually prepared, but then ebbed away, only to make their eventual advance in a forward leap:\n1. The founding of the free cities at the beginning of the Middle Ages. 2. The great inventions and discoveries at the end of the Middle Ages.\nHistory moves very quickly forward at the change from the 11th to the 12th century. New forms of society evolve from old ones. From the fact that many men left their homes, to settle in the cities, sprang up — throughout Germany, France, England, Scotland, and as far as Russia and Italy — cities with new conditions of life, new organisations, laws and constitutions. At the end of the Middle Ages we find the great discoveries, the voyages to India, America, etc., and the world-wide invention of printing. All this shows us what a radical change has been affected through the birth of the new spirit of Science — through Copernicus.\nTwo incisions were made by this; and if we are to study the Middle Ages thoughtfully, these two occurances must be place in the right light. They appear as leaps, but such an event is gradually prepared, until with the force of an avalanche it breaks forth, and rushes forward in a flood. If we pursue them step by step, it will become clear that these two events had been prepared in the life of the Germani. We shall see through what circumstances it was that such great power was given to the Franks, such influence over the configuration of European relationships. For this purpose we must understand the character of that race, the necessary metamorphosis of industrial relationships, and the powerful penetration of Christianity in the 4th century. These two things indicate the alteration in the life of the Germani. They condition the evolution of the Middle Ages. It would be useless to follow all the wanderings of the Germani, to see how Odoacer dethroned the last West Roman Emperor, how the Goths were driven out of Italy by the Emperor Justinian, how the Longobards seized possession of Northern Italy — we see the same circumstances enacted over and over again.\nIn the southern regions, where the Gemani found political and industrial conditions already firmly established, the idiosyncrasies of their own tribes disappeared; they lost all significance. We hear nothing more of the Goths, Gepidae, etc., they have vanished, even to their names. In contrast to this, the Franks had arrived at free, not yet fixed, condition, where serious appropriation was as yet non-existent, and through this political configuration, the Franks became the ruling race.\nNow we must see how these developed in the empire of the Franks, that which we call the Merovingian kingdom. It was actually nothing but many small kingdoms, formed in the most natural way. The Merovingians remained as victors, after they had overcome the others who were originally their equals. All these kingdoms had been formed in the following way: some little tribe wandered in, subjugated the inhabitants and divided the land in such a way that all the members received small or large properties. Thus all dominion was based on land ownership. The most powerful received the largest domain. For the tilling of these properties, a great number of people were employed, some taken from the inhabitants, but part were prisoners of war, made into workers. Simply through this difference between the ownership of less of more land, were power relationships developed. The largest landowner was the king. His power was based on his property — that is the characteristic trait. Out of these powerful relationships, the relationships of rights were formed, and it is interesting to observe how this came about. Certainly we find among the Germanic tribes, laws founded on customs evolved in ancient times, before we have any knowledge of them. Among the smaller tribes all the people assembled to administer justice; later, the members of the tribe only came together on March 1st, to take counsel about their concerns. But now the great landowner was not responsible to the others for what he did on his own property. True, we find a conservative clinging to the old prescriptive laws among the different tribes. We find them preserved for long periods among the Saxons, Thuringians and Frisians, also among the Cheruscans, whose tribe kept them longer than has been generally believed. It was different where large landowning had developed, because the proprietor, absolute in his own domain, became also irresponsible. This irresponsibility gave rise to a new legal position, in which the jurisdiction of power, the authority of the police, was exercised. If another man committed an offence, he was called to account for it; if the irresponsible one did it, the same offence was looked upon as lawful. What was illegal among those without power, was legal among the powerful. They were able to change might into right.\nNow, in this way the Franks could farther extend their power, and, especially in the northeast, could conquer great territories. At a time when war followed war, the less powerful were dependent on the protection of the mightier. Thus arose the fief and vassal system, which called forth a selection of powerful men. Then an arrangement for transferring certain rights by means of contracts sprang up.\nThe great landed property, the king's estate, required special legal conditions, which could be transferred to others by the king or the owner. Together with the land, the jurisdiction and the police authority would be transferred. King's law and the law of the small vassal came into being. As the result of this innovation we see the development of a powerful official class, not on a basis of stipend, but of land owning. Such justiciaries were the highest judges. In the beginning, when they still had to take into consideration the rights of powerful tribes, they were bound to respect ancient laws. Gradually, however, their position became that of an absolute judicature, so that, in course of time, side by side with the kingdom, there was formed in France a kind of official aristocracy which grew to be a rival of the kingship.\nThus in the 6th century, a rivalry developed between the sovereign and the new nobility, and this attained the greatest significance.\nThe original governing race, which sprang from the Merovingians, the large land owners, was succeeded by the Carlovingians who had originally belonged to the official aristocracy. They had been mayors of the palace to the ruling race, which had been overthrown by the rivalry of the aristocratic officials. Essentially, therefore, it was the possession of large property that was the basis of power relations; and the strongest moral current of the church, had to initiate its rule in this roundabout way through the large land owner.\nIt was the characteristic feature of the Frankish Church that, to begin with, it represented nothing but a number of large land owners; we see the rise of bishoprics and abbacies, and of vassals who placed themselves under the protection of the Church, in order to receive fiefs from it. Thus, side by side with the large, worldly land owners, clerical proprietors also arose. This is the reason why we see so little depth, and why the spiritual element which we find in Christianity is essentially due to foreign influence. It was not the Frankish race, but men of the British Isles who succeeded in creating those mighty currents which then flowed out eastwards. In the British Isles, many learned men and pious monks were deeply engaged in work. Real work was being done, as we may see, in particular, by the resumption of Platonism and its alliance with Christianity. We see mysticism, dogmatism, but also enthusiasm and pathos, issuing from here. From here come the first missionaries: Columba, Gallus and Winfried-Boniface, the converter of the Germans. And because these first missionaries had nothing in their mind but the spiritual side of Christianity they were not inclined to conform to the conditions of the Frankish tribes. Theirs was the healing virtue, and they found, especially through Boniface, their chief influence exercised among the East Germani. For this reason, Rome acquired an increasing influence at this time in the empire of the Franks. Two heterogenous elements combined together: the rugged force of the Germani and the spiritual strength of Christianity. They fitted in to each other in such a way that it seems wonderful how these tribes submitted to Christianity, and how Christianity itself modified its nature, to adapt itself to the Germani. These missionaries worked differently from the Frankish kings, who spread Christianity by force of arms. It was not forced into their souls as something alien; their places of worship and sacred customs were preserved; their practices and personalities so respected that old institutions were made use of to diffuse the new content. It is interesting to notice how what is old becomes the garment, what is new becomes the soul. From the Saxon tribe we possess an account of the Life of Jesus: all the details concerning the figure of Jesus were clothed in Germanic dress. Jesus appears as a German duke; his intercourse with the disciples resembles a tribal assembly. This is how the life of Jesus is presented in Heiland.\nAncient heroes were transformed into saints; ancient festivals and ritual customs became Christian. Much of what appears today as exclusively Christian was transferred at that time from heathen customs. In the Frankish empire, on the contrary, we see in ecclesiastical Christianity a means of consolidating power; a Frankish code of law begins with an invocation to “Christ, Who loves the Franks above all other peoples.” In the days when the British missionaries represented the moral influence of Christianity, the influence of the Roman Church also increased considerably. The Frankish kings sought alliance with the papacy. The Longobards had seized possession of Italy, and harassed the bishop of Rome, in particular. They were Aryan Christians. That was why the Roman bishop turned first to the Franks for help, at the same time tendering his influence to the Franks. So the Frankish king became the protector of the pope; and the pope anointed the king. Hence the Frankish kings derived their exalted position, their dignity, from this consecration by the pope. It was an enhancement of what the Franks saw in Christianity. All this took place in the west, in the 7th centure. This alliance between the papacy and the Frankish authority, formed a gradual preparation for the subsequent rule of Charlemagne. Thus we see the accomplishment of important spiritual and social changes. This alone, however, would not have led to an event which proved to be of the greatest importance, a material revolution: the founding of cities. For something was lacking in the Frankish Christian culture, although it had efficiency, intellect and depth.\nThat which we call Science, purely external Science, did not exist for them. We have followed a merely material and moral movement. What Science there was among them had remained at the same level as at their first contact with Christianity. And just as the Frankish tribes took no interest in the improvement of their simple agriculture, and never thought of developing it economically, similarly the Church only sought to build up its moral influence. Primitive tillage offered no special difficulties, such as, in Egypt, have led to the evolution of physics, geometry and technical science. Everything here was simpler, more primitive; thus the financial trading, which was already in use, gave place again to barter.\nSo European culture needed a new stimulus, and cannot be understood without taking this stimulus into account. Out of Asia, form the far East, whence Christianity once came, came now this new culture, from the Arabs. The religion founded there by Mahomet is, in its content, simpler than Christianity. The spiritual content of Mohammedanism is, essentially, based on simple monotheistic ideas confined to a divine fundamental Being, whose nature and form is not closely investigated, but to whose will men surrender, because they have faith. Hence this religion produces proud confidence in this will, a confidence which leads to fatalism, to a complete self-surrender. This is how it became possible for these tribes to extend Arabian rule, in a few generations, over Syria, Mesopotamia and North Africa, as far as to the realm of the Visigoths in Spain, so that, as early as the turn of the 7th to the 8th century, Moorish rulers were established there, and implanted their own culture in place of that of the Visigoths.\nThus something quite new, of an entirely different nature, flowed into European culture. The spirit of Arabism culture was not filled with dogma concerning angels and demons, etc., but precisely with that which was lacking in the Christian Germanic tribes namely, with external science. Here we find all such sciences — medicine, chemistry, mathematical thinking — well developed. The practical spirit brought over from Asia to Spain found employment now in seafaring, etc. It was brought over at a moment when an unscientific spirit had established its kingdom there The Moorish cities became centers of serious scientific work; we see here a culture which cannot fail to be admired by all who know it. Humboldt says of it: “This depth, this intensity, this exactitude of knowledge is unexampled in the history of culture.” The Moorish intellectuals had width of outlook and depth of thought; and not only did they, like the Germani, embrace Greek science, they developed it farther. Aristotle also contiuned to live among them, but with the Arabs, it was the true Aristotle who was honoured, with a wide outlook, as the father of Science. It is interesting to see how the Alexandrine culture, started in Greece, continued its existence here, and with this we tough upon one of the most remarkable currents in the human mind. The Arabs laid the foundations of Objective Science. From them, this flowed, in the first place, into the Anglo-Saxon monasteries in England and Ireland, where the old energetic Celtic blood now dwelt. It is strange to see what active intercourse had been introduced between them and Spain, and how, where profundity of mind and capacity to think were present, Science revived through the medium of the Arabs.\nAnd it is a remarkable phenomenon that the Arabs who, to begin with, took possession of the whole of Spain, were soon outwardly conquered by the Franks under Charles Martel a the Battle of Poiters in 732. By this victory the physical strength of the Franks overcame the physical strength of the Moors. But the spiritual strength of the Arabs remained invincible; and just as, once, Greek culture rose triumphant in Rome, so Arab culture conquered the West, in opposition to the victorious Germani. Now, when the science which was needed to extend the horizon of trade and world intercourse, when city culture, arose, we see that it was Arab influence which made themselves felt here. Quite new elements flowing in sought to adapt themselves to the old.\nWe see expressed by Walther von der Vogelweide the perplexity which may assail anyone who follows, with an open mind, the conflicting currents of the Middle Ages. The poet saw how the Germanic tribes were striving for power, and how an opposing current was flowing from Christianity. That which flowed through the Middle Ages was transmuted by Walther von der Vogelweide into feeling, in the following sorrowful description:\nNo answer came into my mind How men might come by these three things, So that no man need to perish. Two are honour and worldly goods ; These often do each other harm The third, the chiefest of them all, Is simply pleasing God . I longed to have them in one shrine Alas, that that can never be! For worldly goods and honour Dwell not, within one human heart, Together with the grace of God. Hindrances are everywhere, Faithlessness sets endless snares, Haughty force lays all men low. Thus Peace and Right are done to death. Never will the Three find refuge Till these two are healed and well.\nWe shall see shortly how difficult it was for the man of the Middle Ages to combine these three things in their heart, and how these three gave rise to the great struggles which rent that age asunder"
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-8",
+    "title": "Lecture V",
+    "date": "15 Nov 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041115p01.html",
+    "book_title": "The History of the Middle Ages",
+    "content": "If you take up one of the ordinary school books, or any other of the usual presentations of the Middle Ages, dealing with the period of which we are now going to speak — the 8th or 9th century — you will find that the personality of Charlemagne (768–814) occupies an inordinate space in it. Following the feats and triumphal marches of Charlemagne in this way, you will hardly understand what it was that actually made the significance of this epoch. All this was only an external expression of much deeper events in the Middle Ages, events which will appear as the converging of many significant factors. In order to study these factors, we must mention certain things which we have already touched upon, and which will throw light on this subject.\nIf you remember the description of European conditions after the folk migrations, when, after these occurrences, the Germanic tribes came to rest in different places, you will think of the way these races brought their ancient institutions, their manners and customs, with them into their new homes, and developed them there. And we see that they preserved their own peculiar character, a kind of social order, consisting in the distribution of private and common property. There were little social assemblies, which formed their original organisation: village communities, then, later, hundreds and cantons; and in all these, what could be common property was so: forest, meadow, water, etc. And only what a single individual could cultivate was assigned to the private family and became hereditary; all the rest remained common property.\nNow we have seen that the leaders of such tribes received much larger territories at the conquest, and that on this account certain positions of mastery sprang up, especially in Gaul, where much land was still to be reclaimed. For the working of these domains, it was partly members of the former population, partly the Roman colonists or prisoners of war, who were taken. In this way, certain legal conditions grew up. The large landowner was not responsible to others for what he did on his own property; he could not be brought to book for any orders that he gave. Hence he could rescind for his own estate, any legal prescription or police regulation. So, in the Frankish Empire, we meet with no united monarchy; what was called the Empire of the Merovingians was nothing more than such a large landed estate. The Merovingians were one of the families which possessed much land; according to civil law — through the struggle for existence — their rule extended farther and farther. New territories were constantly added to it. The large landowner was not such a king as we have been accustomed to in the 13th, 14th, yes, even in the 16th century; but private government gradually became legal rule.\nHe transferred certain parts of his domain, and with them his rights; to others with less land; that was called being “under exemption\"; this judicial authority had grown out of the irresponsible position in such circumstances. In return, this type of landowner must pay tribute, and do military service for the king in time of war. In the expansion of such proprietary relationships, the Merovingian stock as conquerors took precedence of all others, so that we must retain the formula: the ancient Frankish Empire progressed through purely private legal conditions.\nAgain the transition from the Merovingian to the Carlovingian stock, from which Charles Martel descended, took place in the same way, out of the same conditions. The Carlovingians were originally stewards of the domains of the Merovingians; but they gradually became so influential that Pepin the Short succeeded in putting the imbecile Childeric into a monastery, and, with the help of the pope, in deposing him. From him was descended his successor, Charlemagne. In a cursory survey we can only touch upon the external events; for, indeed, they have no further significance. Charlemagne made war on the neighbouring German tribes and extended his control in certain directions. Even this empire, however, cannot be called a State. He waged lengthy wars against the Saxons, who clung to the ancient village organisation, the old manners and customs, the old Germanic faith, with great tenacity. Victory was won after wearisome wars, fought with extraordinary ferocity on both sides.\nAmong such tribes as the Saxons, one personality in particular would stand out, and would then become a leader. One of these was Widukind, a duke with great possessions and a strong military retinue, whose courage withstood the most violent opposition. He had to be subdued with the greatest cruelty, and then submitted to the rule of Charlemagne. What did the rule amount to? It amounted to this: if the authority of Charlemagne had been withdrawn, nothing special would have happened. Those tribesmen who in their thousands had been obliged to submit to baptism, would have gone on living in the same way as before.\nIt was the form Charlemagne had given the Church which established his powerful position. Through the power of the Church these territories were subdued. Bishoprics and monasteries were founded, the large properties formerly possessed by the Saxons were distributed. The cultivation of these was in the hands of the bishops and abbots; thus the Church undertook what had formerly been done by secular landholders protected by “exemption,” namely, judiciary authority. If the Saxons did not acquiesce, they were coerced by fresh inroads of Charlemagne. Thus the same things went on as in western France: the smaller landowners could not carry on alone, hence they gave what they had to the monasteries and bishoprics, to receive it again under feudal tenure.\nThe one condition was, then, that the large properties should belong to the Church, as in the newly established bishoprics of Paderborn, Merseburg and Erfurt, which were cultivated for the bishop by the conquered tribes. But even those who still had their own possessions held them as fiefs and had to pay ever-increasing taxes to the bishoprics and abbeys. This was how the rule of Charlemagne was established: with the help of the great influence obtained by the Church whose suzerain he was, his position of authority was achieved.\nCharles extended his authority in other regions, just as he was extending it here. In Bavaria he succeeded in breaking the power of Duke Tassilo and sending him to a monastery, so that he might bring Bavaria under his own dominion. The Bavarians had allied themselves with the Avars, a people who may be called the successors of the Huns. Charles was victorious in this struggle and fortified a strip of land as a boundary against the Avars, the original Avarian limit of the land which to-day is Austria. In the same way he had protected himself also against the Danes.\nLike Pepin he fought in Italy against the Longobards, who were harassing the pope; again he was victorious, and established his authority there. He experienced too against the Moors in Spain, and almost everywhere he was the victor. We see Frankish rule established over the whole of the European world of those days; it merely contained the germ of the future State.\nIn these newly won regions, Counts were inaugurated, who exercised justiciary authority. In the places where Charlemagne alternatively held his court — fortified places called Palatinates — were the Counts Palatine, mostly large landowners, who received certain tribute from the surrounding districts. It was not only tribute from the land and soil, however, which fell to their share; they also received revenues from the administration of justice. If a murder were committed, the public tribunal was convened by the Count Palatine. A relative, or someone who was closely connected with the victim, brought the indictment. At that time certain compensation could be paid for murder, a recognised sum, differing in value for a free man and an unfree, paid partly to the family of the murdered man, partly to the justiciary of the canton, and partly to the king's central fund. Those who looked after communal concerns — actually only such as concerned taxes and defense — were the land-graves, who travelled from one district to another, ambassadors with no special function.\nUnder these conditions, the divergence between the new nobility of landowners and the serfs became more and more marked, and also between the landowners and those freemen who were indeed personally still free, but had fallen into a condition of servile dependence, because they had to pay heavy tribute and to render compulsory military service. These conditions grew more and more critical; secular and ecclesiastical property became increasingly extensive; and soon we see the populace in bitter dependence, and already we meet with small conspiracies — revolts — foreshadowing what we know as the Peasant Wars. We can understand that, in the meantime, material culture developed more and more productively. Many Germanic tribes had had no concern with agriculture before the folk migrations, but had earned their living by cattle raising; now they were developing agriculture more and more; especially were they cultivating oats and barley, but also wheat, leeks, etc. These were the essential things which were important in that older civilisation. There was, as yet, no actual handicraft; it was only evolving under the surface; weaving, dyeing, etc. were mostly carried on by the women at home. The arts of the goldsmith and the smith were the first crafts to be cultivated. Still less important was trade.\nActual cities were developed from the 10th century onwards, and therewith a historical event began to take shape. But what sprang up with these cities, namely trade, had at that time no importance; at its best it was only a trade in valuables from the East, carried on by Israelite merchants. Trade usages hardly existed, although Charlemagne had already had coins minted. Nearly everything was barter, in which cattle, weapons, and such things were exchanged.\nThis is how we must picture the material culture of these regions; and now we shall understand why the spiritual culture also was bound to assume a certain definite form. Nothing of what we picture as spiritual culture existed in these regions, either among the freemen or the serfs. Hunting, war, agriculture, were the occupations of the landowners; princes, dukes, kings, even poets, unless they were ecclesiastics, could seldom read and write. Wolfram von Eschenbach had to dictate his poems to a clergyman and let him read them aloud to him; Hartmann von der Aue boasts, as a special attribute, that he can read books. In all that secular culture catered for, there was no question of reading and writing. Only in enclosed monasteries were Art and Science studied. All other students were directed to what was offered them in the teaching and preaching of the clergy. And that brought about their dependence on the clergy and the monks; it gave the Church its authority.\nWhen we read descriptions today of what is called “the dark Middle Ages” — persecution of heretics, trials of witches, and so on — we must be clear that these conditions only began with the 13th century. In the older times nothing of this kind existed. The Church had no more authority than the secular large landowners. Either the Church went hand-in-hand with the secular authority, and was only a branch of it, or it was endeavouring to cultivate theology and the science of Christianity.\nUntil the current of spiritual influence came from the Arabs, all spiritual concerns were fostered only in the monasteries; the activities of the monks were completely unknown to the world outside. All that was known outside the monasteries was the preaching, and a kind of spiritual instruction given in the primitive schools.\nThe authority of the Church was enhanced by the fact that it was the clergy themselves who carried out all the arrangements for promoting knowledge. The monks were the architects; it was they who adorned the churches with statues, they who copied the works of classical, too, the emperor's chancellors, were, for the most part, monks.\nOne form of culture which was fostered in the monasteries was Scholasticism. A later was Mysticism. This scholasticism, which flourished until the middle of the 14th century, endeavoured — at least at one juncture — to inculcate a severely disciplined way of thinking. There were severe examinations to undergo; nobody could make progress in absolutely logical discipline of thinking without hard tests; only those who could really think logically, were able to take part in the spiritual life. Today that is not considered. But actually it was because of this training in consistent logic that when the Moorish-Arabian culture came to Europe, this science found disciplined thinking there already. The forms of thought with which Science works today were already there; there are very few arrangements of ideas, which are not derived from thence.\nThe concepts with which the Science — still operate today, such as subject and object, were established at that time. A training of thought, such as does not appear elsewhere in world history, was developed. The keen thinker of today owes that which flows in the veins of his intellect to the training fostered between the 5th and 14th centuries. Now some may feel it to be unjust that the masses at that time had nothing of all this; but the course of world history is not directed by justice of injustice, it follows the universal law of cause and effect. Thus we see here two definite currents flowing side by side: 1. Outside, material culture, absolutely without science; 2. A finely chiseled culture, confined to a few within the Church. Yet the culture of the cities was based on this strict scholastic way of thinking. The men who carried through the great revolution were ecclesiastics: Copernicus was a prebendary, Giordano Bruno was a Dominican friar. Their education and that of many others, their formal schooling, was rooted in this spirit of the Church. They were not powerful men, but simple monks, who, indeed, often suffered under the oppression of those in power.\nNor was it bishops and rich abbots, but on the contrary, poor monks, living in obscurity, who propagated the spread of Science. The Church, having allied itself with external powers, was obliged to materialise itself; it had to secularise its teachings and its whole character. Very long ago, up to the 12th century, nothing was held more solemn, more sublime, by the Christians, than the Lord's Supper. It was regarded as a sacrifice of grateful remembrance, a symbol of the intensifying of Christianity. Then came the secularisation, the lack of understanding for such exalted spiritual facts, especially as regards the festivals.\nIn the 9th century there lived in the land of the Franks, at the court of Charles the Bald, Scotus Erigena, a very distinguished Irish monk, in whose book De Divisioni Naturae we find a rich store of profound intellectual thought — though, indeed, not what the 20th century understands as Science. Erigena had to fight against hostile criticism in the Church. He defended the old doctrine that the Lord's Supper represented the symbolism of the highest Sacrifice. Another, materialistic, interpretation existed, and was supported in Rome, namely, that the bread and wine was actually transformed into flesh and blood. This dogma of the Lord's Supper originated under the influence of this continuous materialisation, but it only became official in the 13th century.\nScotus Erigena had to take refuge in England, and at the instigation of the pope, was murdered in his own monastary by the fraternity of monks. These struggles took place, not within the Church, but through the interpenetration of secular influence. You see that spiritual life was confined to a few, and was closed to the masses, upon whom lay an ever-increasing pressure, both from the secular and the spiritual side. In this way discontent continued to grow. It could not be otherwise than that dissatisfaction should increase among these people of divided loyalties. In country, on the farms, new causes of discontent kept cropping up. No wonder that the small towns, such as those already established on the Rhine and the Danube, should continually grow larger and form themselves anew from the influx of those who could no longer get on in the country. The fundamental cause of this reorganisation of conditions was the people's thirst for freedom.\nIt was a purely natural motive which gave rise to the culture of the cities. Spiritual culture remained undisturbed for the time being; many cities developed round the bishoprics and monasteries. From the city-culture rose all that constituted trade and industry in the Middle Ages, and afterwards brought about quite different relationships.\nThe need to develop the full life of the human personality, was the cause of the founding of the cities. It was a long step on the path of freedom; as, indeed, according to the words of Hegel, history signifies the education of the human race towards freedom.\nAnd if we follow the history of the Middle Ages farther, we shall see that this founding of the city-culture represented, not an insignificant, but a very important step on the path of freedom."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-9",
+    "title": "Lecture VI",
+    "date": "6 Dec 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041206p01.html",
+    "book_title": "The History of the Middle Ages",
+    "content": "The history of the Middle Ages is specially important for human study, because it deals with an epoch which we are able to investigate from its simple origin up to the rise of what we call “States.” And, moreover, we have here an interweaving of many factors. In simple circumstances, a complete form of culture, such as Christianity is, was living a full life. Out of a condition of barbarism, we see developing more and more the blossom of medieval culture — what we know as “discoveries.”\nTo those races, thrown confusedly together on the path of folk migrations, we see arriving by a complicated, roundabout way that which today we term “Science.” The Middle Ages had come into a great heritage. Yet, of what we have learnt to know of Greek culture, nothing has remained but a few traditions, seen through the spectacles of Christian conceptions. On the other hand, a very great inheritance has remained from the days of the Roman Empire, with its government and administration of justice, showing a serried unity such as had never before appeared in world history, nor is to be found elsewhere in the Middle Ages. It is only in the new age, otherwise so proud of its freedom, that we meet with such an expansion of the authority of the State. This, allied with that other idealistic culture movement by which the Roman Empire had gradually been penetrated and absorbed, came to people who know nothing of any such education and who, moreover, had been uprooted by the folk migrations. All these tribes — Goths, Heruleans, Longobards, Franks, Saxons, etc. — were in quite a different position from the Romans; they had remained completely at the stage of childhood.\nThey led a kind of Nature-life, confined to hunting and waging war, without settled law or justice. A great transition now took place in the relationship and conceptions of these tribes, who lived together in small groups.\nWhat held these separate tribes together? The memory of some ancestor, who had given the tribe its name — the memory of mighty generations which had distinguished themselves in ancient wars or at the conquest of new land, handing down to the tribe the titles of count, prince and duke.\nThe transition was expressed in a liking for communal ground. Men began to attach more value to community of land ownership than to blood relationship.\nInstead of tribal membership, appeared what we call the village community. The whole of material life was based on land and soil. There was still neither trade nor industry; all that was necessary in that line was looked after by the women, young people and slaves. The majority of the population knew nothing beyond agriculture and frequent military expeditions. They had no notion of what we call culture today, no idea of what we look upon as the first essentials: reading and writing. It is reckoned as a special merit of Charlemagne's that in his old age he took the trouble to learn to read and write. All the education there was in the conquered districts lay in the hands of the Roman population. From it sprang the civil service; hence the influence of the Roman conception of justice. Thus it was in the western regions; it was different in the east. There, in the districts which form the Germany of today, the original Germanic character had kept itself free from these influences. The unbroken strength of the Thuringian and Saxon tribes was something with which everyone had to reckon on, in the Middle Ages.\nThe only thing which brought education to them was Christianity. Yet the actual Sciences — such as Mathematics, Natural Science, etc. — were not included in it. To have added moral, ethical concepts was the merit of Christianity. Especially among the Frankish tribes, the influence of the clergy, particularly of the immigrant Celtic monks, was very strong. Among these tribes, which had been led by favourable circumstances into a free land, where, in regions still to a large extent uncultivated, they could develop their own particular character — we can best see how this metamorphosis was accomplished. The metamorphosis of small communities to larger ones came about here. Counts and princes conquered more and more territories and enfeoffed to small proprietors, parts of their property. By this means, the power of the large landowner extended farther and farther. A kind of jurisdiction and constitution arose out of this transfer of relationships belonging originally to purely civil law. What the Irish and Scottish monks originally instigated was a religious zeal, a holy inspiration, to work for the salvation of mankind. All that was changed. The Franks could only think of Christianity as a means to obtaining power. Charlemagne, in particular, made use of the Church to increase his dominion. Any bishop instituted by him was generally chosen as a tool for his government. In the beginning the Church was led only by those who were zealous for the faith, those who were genuinely convinced; later, under the influence of external authority, the Church itself sought to obtain power relationships. Thus the bishop was first a ministering member of the Church, later himself a ruler and landowner. It is thus we see the Middle Ages at about the time of Charlemagne. But we cannot speak of an empire of Charlemagne, as we speak of empires today. The ownership of large territories made it possible to transfer landed property. New territory was conquered and produced new transfers. Thus, the justiciaries of the court came into existence. Instead of the old canton tribunals, court tribunals arose, with the imperial counts, or — if they were appointed by bishops — provosts.\nIn the meantime, there were still always independent tribes, who clung to their old dukes, their self-chosen justiciaries.\nSo was it still at the death of Charlemagne, and so it remained under his son, Louis the Pious. This we see from his relations with his three sons, Lothair, Pepin and Louis. He divided his empire among the three, as if it were a private property, and when he had another son, by a second marriage, and was about to alter the division, his elder sons rose against him, conquered him at the battle of Lügenfeld and compelled him to abdicate, so that their property should not be reduced. This gives us clear insight into what mattered most in such a State. We see, too, what a false picture is given in the histories dealing with this period. The fighting which took place was for purely private rights, and though the actual populace was, of course, disturbed and harassed by the military expeditions and massing of troops, yet, for the progress of mankind, all these struggles in the post-Carlovingian epoch, were really of no significance.\nThat, however, which had real significance was the opposition that had developed between the empire of the Franks and the empire which comprised Germany and Austria. In the Western Empire a struggle had gradually arisen between the secular nobility and the ruling ecclesiastical power. The educated clergy supplied what had formerly been provided by those who were left from the Roman population: the higher court officials, the clerks of the law courts, etc. These all possessed a quite uniform education, issuing from the monasteries. Side by side with the educated clergy were the uneducated masses, who were entirely dependent on these cultured ecclesiastics. The whole education of those days proceeded from what was taught in the monastery schools. Christian theology embraced a septuple of sciences, three lower and four higher.\nThus we see, outside, on the land, a race entirely engaged in war and agriculture; whereas in churches, schools and offices, that which sprang from the monastery schools, the sciences were taught. The three lower ones were: Grammar, Logic and Dialectics. Grammar was the science of speech, Logic of thinking — and they have persisted in the same form, since they were taught, from Greece, in the monasteries of the Middle Ages up to the 19th century; whereas now they are considered superfluous. Next to Logic came Dialectics, which has completely disappeared from the scientific curriculum of today. Medieval education was based on Dialectics, which everyone who hoped to achieve anything in intellectual life had to learn and master. Dialectics is the art of defending a truth against an attack, according to the correct rules. In order to do this, the laws of reason had to be known. Sophism could not be emplolyed when it was a question of permanently defending a truth; it was not the age of newspapers, where reasons which were valid today, are not accepted tomorrow.\nFrom Dialectics springs what we may call the scientific and scholarly conscience; and that everyone should have, who wishes to join in scientific work. Not everything can be defended in a rational way; hence the great importance of this training, to be able to make conscientious distinctions. Later, however, this teaching degenerated, so that, towards the end of the Middle Ages, it might happen that someone might volunteer to defend any truth, for 24 hours long, against the attacks of assembled professors, students and layman from Paris.\nThose who aspired to the vocation of judge were trained by Dialectics — not so much the presidents of the law courts as those who drew up the verdicts.\nWhen, at the beginning of Faust , Goethe makes him say:\n“True, I've more with than all your solemn fools, Priests, doctors, scribes, magisters of the schools. ”\nhe is characterising the dignities and offices to which, in these days, a man might attain through a scientific education. A “Doctor” was one who could make independent use of his knowledge. A “Master” had the right to teach in the universities. “Clerks” were all those who were engaged in civil service, whether in a high or low position. “Parsons” were all clergymen. The word Pfaffe (parson) was not in those days a term of contempt, but an honorary title. Thus, as late as the 14th century, Meister Eckhardt calls Plato the great Greek “Pfaffe.”\nThe four higher sciences were: Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy and Music.\nGeometry is the science of space. Arithmetic is a higher form of counting. Astronomy, too, represented more of less what we understand by it today. Music was not the same as that which we call music today.\nMusic was the science of harmony of the spheres. It was believed that the whole universe stood in harmonious relationship to its individual constituents. All these relationships, expressed in figures, men sought to discover. As also, indeed, colours, notes, etc. are based on certain numbers. In music they sought clarity concerning the laws of harmony, of rhythmic relationships; the concord of cosmic laws was taught.\nThus I have tried to give you an idea of the activities of the class which ruled on account of its education. More and more did this education gain the upper hand in the western realm which we now call France. It was different in Germany. There the tribes had remained independent; they had retained their simple customs, had preserved their freedom to a large extent. The seamy side of these primitive relationships, however, was that here the clergy were uneducated, and allowed themselves to be used as a means to power in the hands of the dukes and emperors.\nThe dominion of the western empire remained with the Carlovingians. Yet the rulers of this house were never of much value. Eventually the inefficiency of these Carlovingian rulers became especially clear when the Normans — the warlike pirates from the north — harassed the land. These Normans forced their way into the country from the mouths of the rivers Elbe and Weser, plundering the coasts everywhere, especially in France, where they took possession of the northern regions, and pressed forward as far as Paris. At that time Charles III was reigning; he himself proved utterly incapable of undertaking anything against the Normans. Hence it was easy for an unknown Austrian duke, Arnulf of Cairinthia, to put an end to the Carlovingian rule and to usurp the government himself. At first he enjoyed great respect, since he had succeeded in conquering the Normans. But the jealousy among the princes was so great that Arnulf was obliged to appeal to the Church and to conclude an alliance with it. He had to make an expedition into Italy, and in general to submit to ecclesiastical authority at many points. The consequence was that, after his death, the Church, as we shall see, made use of its power. It was not a secular prince or count, but the Archbishop of Mainz, who became the guardian of his son, Louis the Child. In this way the Archbishop assumed all the privliges of government, and henceforth we see the foundations laid for the rule of the Church, which was no longer merely exploited by the secular rulers, but was more and more united in the exercise of secular government and secular jurisdiction. The result of this was that the struggle between secular and ecclesiastical power relaxed, and this introduced that important period of history — the struggle between the Emperor and the Pope. Conventional historical descriptions, which picture these two powers as quite distinct from each other are incorrect. They were only rivals in the fight for external authority, but they were equal powers working in the same direction. We are only dealing with a quarrel between a Church grown secular, and a secular power. We see power expanding in two directions; and as a third, we see the rise of the “free cities,” spreading over the whole of Europe."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-10",
+    "title": "Lecture VII",
+    "date": "13 Dec 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041213p01.html",
+    "book_title": "The History of the Middle Ages",
+    "content": "A week ago, we studied the contrast between what is today France, on the one hand, and Austria and Germany on the other, as it had developed in the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries.\nWe saw that the Western Empire was distinguished by the traces left of the old Roman culture; and that the Church had soon acquired authority by itself becoming the owner of large tracts of land. So it came to a struggle between the secular nobility and the ambitious Church. The Church had been endowed, especially by Charlemagne, with immense stretches of landed property, so that it became the confederate of the secular rulers, because it was brought into feudal relationships both with those beneath and those above it.\nThose who were defeated had come into feudal relationship with the conquerors; the nobles developed into vassals of the king, and thus the kingdom grew stronger and stronger. The Western Empire was continually concerned with the opposition between the vassals and the Church. It was different in the Eastern Empire. Here the old feelings of independence, the sentiment of freedom still persisted, so that the tribal dukes would not consent to enter into a situation of dependence. Thus the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries were filled with continual efforts of the so-called kings — who were indeed elected, but actually were only kings to their own tribes — to bring the dukes of the other tribes into dependence on themselves.\nHistory tells of many struggles of this kind. The Carlovingians were succeeded, after the Frankish Conrad, by a Saxon dynasty, and much is told of the deeds of Henry I, Otto I, II & III and Henry II, as well as of the subsequent Frankish kings, Conrad II and Henry III, IV &V. These kings who, in the Eastern Empire, were elected, had, nevertheless, no say in the constitution or legislation of the tribes. Thus, it is much more important to know what the empire actually signified at that time, than to form an accurate picture of the individual battles.\nThere were very large dukedoms, which had arisen in the way described. During the original migrations into these regions, some individuals had acquired large properties, and had become more and more powerful; smaller owners became dependent on them, and were obliged to surrender their property as fiefs, and then to pay tribute.\nThus, the tribal dukes gradually absorbed the small properties, and by giving others some part of their large property on feudal tenure, secured for themselves the right to have a recognised number of fighting men at their disposal, and to paid a definite sum.\nThus, through the absorption of the smaller properties by the greater, the Saxon, Frankish, Swabian, Bavarian and other dukedoms came into existence. Gradually, too, the jurisdiction of the cantonal law court was transferred to the so-called high court of justice, which had been thrust upon the vassals and peasants by the dukes. The Church, according to its regulations, must exercise its jurisdiction through provosts. Even the king was nothing but a large landowner. He had vassals, fighting men whom he had forced into his service; moreover he had acquired demesnes, and with them he had established his authority in various places. The relationship of the duke to the king was also only that of a vassal, because he paid a fixed tribute to the court. Jurisdiction was a ducal concern. Only in the frontier region against the Magyars, Wends and Danes, was jurisdiction exercised by the margraves and counts-palatine. There were no large States with central administration and uniform armies. Hence arose the eternal wars of kings against rebellious dukes who did not wish to furnish tribute. Then it gradually became necessary for the Church to make a move.\nIt was consistent with piety to insist upon the Church paying its dues to the king. It was Otto I, in particular who in all piety, in all ecclesiastical orthodoxy, obliged the Church to render this tribute. The bishops were compelled to do as other vassals did. Church property was divided into two parts, of which one was tilled by the serfs for the bishops, on whom they became completely dependent. Another district remained in less definite relationship; there the peasants had to attend to the fields for the king, in the name of the bishop.\nBecause of new enemies, the emperors saw themselves forced into a closer relationship with the Church. Powerful enemies threatened Central Europe. The Normans gave up their incursions, after having again and again harassed the tribes, and eventually been conquered by Arnulf of Carinthia at the battle of Tours. They had acquired Brittany for themselves.\nThen, from the east, Finnish-Ugrian tribes made inroads, and the invasions of these Magyars caused indescribable terror. Old accounts tell of the horrible brutality of their victorious campaign. The merit of having driven them back is generally ascribed to Henry I and Otto I. To a certain extent this is correct. But the incursions of the Magyars were not to be compared with the declaration and conduct of later wars.\nThe Magyars invaded at a moment when the dukes were specially rebellious, and Henry I had to begin by asking for a truce in order to create for himself at least some kind of united army. This closing of the ranks was only affected in the department of military affairs, by urgent need.\nWe have seen how jurisdiction gradually passed over to the land owners, the dukes and kings. Increasingly undignified relationships were formed. A number of people, who had formerly been free peasants had to surrender all they possessed, to come under the sway of the large landowners. Then they were employed not only in agriculture, but as messengers, craftsmen, and on military service. A kind of trade was growing up, especially as a result of the enhanced productivity of the soil, which was constantly increasing, thanks to the employment of so many workmen. At the same time, a definite class of artisans was developing. Hitherto there had been nothing of the kind. As already mentioned, the necessary work in the house was attended to by slaves and women. The only handicrafts had been those of the smith and the goldsmith. But now, through these developments, a new class of artisans and tradesmen was being formed. In places where there were suitable markets, fortified settlements were established all over Europe. Hither came the discontented among those who were unfairly treated, so that the congestion became greater and greater. This trait of the time forced the king to rely on the cities for support.\nCalvary was needed against the Magyar horsemen. This cavalry formed the basis of the class of knights which arose during this period. All these must be combined together to obtain a true picture of the course things were taking at that time. This is more important than a detailed appreciation of those battles.\nIn the fighting on the marshes in 933, among the copper mines in 955, the Magyars were defeated, and suffered such terrible discomfiture that their appetite for more invasions really failed. They founded an empire for themselves in the vicinity of the Danube, in what is today Hungary. At that time the emperors were obliged to rely on the Church; Christianity was politically exploited. The Magyars were converted to Christianity especially by the bishopric of Passau. TO understand what was passing in the souls of men in those days, we must not reckon with later conceptions. There dwelt in the hearts of the people an intensive faith, religious feeling enhanced to sentimental enthusiasm. They listened to the clergy in all matters and were content to be led by them in all their concerns. The dukes and kings favoured this kind of servility. From Charlemagne onward, they had depended on this lordship over souls.\nThus, the clergy became the best and strongest counsellors, and crept into the hearts and souls of the people.\nMoreover, it happened that at that time a very strong influence was exercised through the Arabs, not only, as described above, from scientific sources, there were also literary influences, which gave the soul of the Middle Ages a new character. A great accumulation of sagas, fairy tales, legends, sentiments and pictures were implanted in the folk-soul; and this soul-influence transmitted from the East to Europe, was so intensive that we see the originally rough soul of the Germanic peoples assuming milder manners. Moreover their piety became permeated by an element of great importance, namely, the cult of the Virgin Mary, and the altered position of women which arose from it. He who does not appreciate this, knows nothing of the history of the Middle Ages. He shuts his eyes to such facts as that the great mass of the people were often seized with epidemic fear. Fear of this king seized the people about the year 1000 (during the reign of the Emperor Otto III. 983–1002), which was to bring about the end of the world. This great event, to be prepared for by penitential exercises and pilgrimages, stirred the whole of Germany. The Emperor Otto III himself undertook a pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Adelbert of Prussia. All this resulted from the folk-soul of the time. He who does not understand this, fails also to understand the rise of the later Crusades. Here also material causes have been sought for the movement, but he who sees it in that light only, is talking beside the point.\nThe secularism of the bishops and abbots could not remain without reaction, without opposition, and so we can understand the strong movement towards reform which emanated from Cluny. The influence of the Cluniacs was immensely powerful; that it was possible to enforce the “Truce of God” was proof of this.\nAt a time when there was nowhere a uniformly governed empire, we can estimate what it meant for the endeavours of the Cluny monks to succeed in so limiting the law of might for some days of the week — from Friday to Monday — that during this interval no feuds were fought out. It must be remembered that, at that time, there was still no proper administration of justice; the law of might had full sway. The harsh struggle between the German emperors and the popes was carried out, not merely from selfish interests, but also, on the part of the Church, from fanaticism. The pope felt himself to be the representative of Christ, as well as lord of the secular domain — as if the empire of Christ gave him also secular authority.\nPope Gregory VII, who forced the Emperor Henry IV to the Canoses submission, was originally a Cluny monk, and had acquired his fanaticism there. It was a tendency of the papacy to declare: Just as there are two rulers in the solar system — the Sun and the Moon — so also in human life; the Pope is the Sun, the King is the Moon, receiving his light only from the Church. This opinion found acceptance and was recognised as legitimate even by the great poet Dante, who, in connection with the allocation of authority, characterised the supremacy of the clerical over the secular powers as right and proper. Now, this contest between emperor and pope had reached such dimensions, because in the meanwhile a certain unifying process had been going on. The different dukedoms had been soldered together by external authority. The dukes now saw themselves obliged to render military service and definite tribute to the emperor. All the following countries: Italy, Burgundy, Lorraine, France, Austria and Hungary, Saxony and Poland stood, for a time, in feudal relationship to the German crown.\nThus in the 11th century a certain unity had been established. This increased the power of the Church. At the death of Henty III, it was not secular princes who were appointed guardians of the young king, but the Archbishops, Hanno of Cologne, and later, Adalbert of Bremen.\nThe permeation of the folk-soul with religious sentiment had led to a blind belief in authority. Now Rome's chance had come. A clever policy was introduced from Rome. The clergy must be detached from all secular interests, so as to have only the one thing before their eyes: preaching and the control of the people. For this purpose, the clergymen must be made completely independent. Thus in the 11th century, celibacy of the clergy became involved with the world through self-chosen blood-ties, would lose his independence and be unable to give such untrammeled service.\nThis gave the clergy and the popes a tendency towards the development of an inflexible will: only one thing before their eyes — the authority of the Church. So it came about that, with the possession of the bishoprics, the Church could demand a say in the government. Formerly, secular princes had possession of every bishopric which was vacant. Now the decision was to depend on spiritual interests alone; and authority was enhanced, because all appointments were in the hands of the Church. From this arose the quarrel about Investiture, to which Henry IV would not consent, and which led to his submission at Canossa.\nAll this was comprised in the contest between secular and spiritual power. We saw, in the case of Clovis, that the God of the Christians was his God, because he led the armies to victory; and now we see how the Church itself is acquiring authority. This must be understood, if we are to grasp the new conditions which brought about the Crusades.\nWe have seen, in connection with the Franks, what had become of the tribes that had been forced from their dwellings by the folk migrations. We saw how Christianity had become authoritative in all circumstances of life, how monasteries and bishoprics had become the central point of the new settlements, and that it was not in spiritual matters alone that the monks were the leaders of the people; they instructed them also in the cultivation of various fruits, were themselves the builders of the churches, and so on.\nThe cities were content to establish themselves around the bishoprics, and everywhere we see powerful influence of the Church.\nWe see the influence of the Moors entering into Science and Literature. Through the Crusades, we shall learn to know another influence of very great importance; it likewise came from the East. It was through these influences that the great inventions and discoveries were made. For over there in China and the East, many things were well-known of which the West had no idea: the manufacture of paper, silk-weaving, the use of gunpowder, etc. Thus, on these lines the first impulse was given to the great inventions.\nSo from two sides we have seen mighty impulses exercising their influence on mediaeval humanity. Keep this in mind together with the founding of the cities, and you will feel that a century was dawning which would give a powerful impetus to evolution. To follow this in the right way, it is not enough merely to absorb it into you understanding. No one really understands the events who tries to grasp them with his understanding only, and not with feeling, who cannot enter into the subtleties of the fold-soul and grasp what is carried on and accomplished within it. To him, the words of Faust apply:\n\"And what the spirit of the times men call, Is merely their own spirit after all Wherein, distorted oft, the times are glass's.\"\n(Ana Swanwick's translation.)"
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-11",
+    "title": "Lecture VIII",
+    "date": "20 Dec 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041220p01.html",
+    "book_title": "The History of the Middle Ages",
+    "content": "We are now half-way through the Middle Ages, with the 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th centuries before us. This period is important, full of significance, because in it we can study the rise of the great empires. In studying antiquity, too, we learnt of great State-dominions, but they lie so far behind us that a true, historical judgment is difficult. In the Middle Ages, however, we see what is called “empire,” evolving from apparently insignificant causes. For, if an empire is something which has a communal army, a constitution, and courts of justice — there was no such thing in Germany. As late as the 13th and 14th centuries, these regions were still divided into separate, individual territories.\nNot until the reign of Henry III (1039–1056), did something occur which was instrumental in uniting the State territories; for this emperor succeeded in combining the individual tribal dukes into a kind of imperial official department. Before, they had taken their supreme position from the special characteristics of the tribe; now they had become Ministers of State — liegemen of the emperor. Gradually an equalisation of the lower vassals took place who, from freemen, became, with the Ministers, liegemen of the emperor. In process of time, they formed what is called the lower nobility, out of which the ranks of knighthood were recruited, the class which played so important a part in the Crusades. Already in the reign of Henry IV, the knights were playing a considerable part.\nWhen Gregory VII excommunicated Henry IV, only some of the German princes stood by the emperor; others were under the influence of the pope and elected different rival kings. That fighting was not important; but what is important is that, through these various conflicts, the class of knights acquired special significance. Continual feuds and wars prevailed; brutality continued to increase. The peasant class suffered much from the pillaging expeditions. The last free peasants could no longer hold out, and were swallowed up by the lords and dukes, and these again by the kings. And from this unedifying process we see arise what we know as “empire.”\nIn this connection there was no difference between secular and spiritual princes; but the difference was great between the secularised clergy and those in the monasteries. The clergy governed by the bishops were mostly uneducated, unable to read and write, and of boorish manners. They made profit out of their feudal tenants. The bishops busied themselves with the administration of their property and were as uneducated as the knights or peasants: nothing of what we may call culture existed. Thus the political situation made it possible to consolidate the Church ever more and more, from Rome.\nIt was different in the monasteries. Here much work was done, by the men and women. Profound learning was to be met with here; all education of those days proceeded entirely from the monasteries. In this matter they did not allow themselves to be made dependent on the political power of Rome, which was based on the secular ascendency of the clergy. That which emanated from Rome can be judged in quite different ways. A certain struggle had to be carried on against the brutality, against the club law, of the German tribes. Zeal for spiritual assets, the desire to spread the authority of mediaeval thought over the whole world, was what Rome wished for. The more excellent will, at any rate, came from Rome, and not from the German princes. In this sense we must grasp what Gregory VII wanted, when he demanded the celibate state, and what Nicolas II felt, when he could not endure the claim of the secular princes to exercise influence on the appointments to bishoprics: it was an opposition to the growing savagery of the German territories. Thus the wars of Henry IV against the Saxons were not only almost as bloody as the earlier wars of Charlemagne against the same race, but they were waged with a quite exceptional disregard of loyalty and good faith.\nThrough all these wars, the welfare of the people was more and more disorganised. Out of the storms of the times there arose a deeply religious trait, which became exaggerated to the sentimental emotionalism that I described to you in connection with the year 1000. This religious emotionalism drove the populace to constant pilgrimages to the East.\nOriginally the Christian religion knew nothing of clinging to any kind of dogma. It depended on the content of ideas, not on the external wording. You have seen in how free a way the Christian idea was developed in Heiland , and how, for his own countrymen, the poet transposed the life of Christ into Old Saxon conditions. He conceived the externals quite freely; they could take place in Germany, just as well as in Palestine.\nUnder conditions becoming more and more externalised, the outward form of faith had become a vital question for the Church. It could no longer be left to the discretion of the tribes.\nAs a counterpart of political power, dogma also became firm and rigid.\nThe princes attempted to make use of the secular power of the Church in their own interests; the episcopal sees were filled by younger brothers, who seemed, either physically of mentally, to be unfit for anything else. Quite gradually conditions altered, and the old epoch merged into the new.\nAnd now appeared the Crusades, which we can understand psychologically from the mood that prevailed in the Middle Ages. As a result of the existing religious emotionalism, it was easy for the pope — through his own agents, such as Peter of Amiens and others — to spur men on to the Crusades. Added to this, a great number of people were now completely destitute. So it was not onl religious motives which contributed to the crusading zeal. More and more freemen had become vassals; others had been obliged to leave their property, and had become vagrants, possessing nothing but what they stood up in.\nAmong these wanderers, who came from all classed — even from the nobility — there were a great many with nothing to do, who were ready for any enterprise — including the Crusades.\nSo, we come to understand that a large number of factors were at work: religious emotionalism, rigid dogma and material oppression. How powerfully these causes worked, we see from the fact that the first Crusaded took place, half a million people travelled to the East. The first external impulse was given by the ill-treatment of the numerous pilgrims at the hands of the Saracens. Still, there were deeper causes underlying it.\nMen were subjecting themselves to a rigid dogma; and those who do not understand how, in those days, men clung with heart and soul to religion, know nothing of the Middle Ages. A sermon had a kindling influence on the people, if it struck the right chord. Many thought to find salvation through joining the Crusade; others hoped to obtain forgiveness of their sins. Our modern point of view can give us no true picture of this mediaeval phenomenon; here we have to do with many intangible causes.\nIt is not the causes, but the effects, of the Crusades, which are of special significance. One of these effects became visible very soon, namely a much more intimate exchange between the different countries.\nHitherto, Germany in general had remained almost unknown to the Romance countries; now they were brought close to one another by comradship in arms. Moorish science, too, found a real entrance in this way. Formerly there had been Chairs in the Universities only in Spain, Italy and France; it was not until after the Crusades that they were established in Germany. Now, for the first time the influence of true Science spread from the East. Until now, this had been a completely closed book; and great cultural treasures were preserved in the writings of Greek classical authors. Actually, it was through contact with the East that Science first originated.\nThe indeterminate influence of religious emotionalism had assumed a definite form; it had become what is called Mediaeval Science. I should like to give you some description of this Science.\nIn the first place, it developed two ways of thinking, ways which became noticeable in the scientific life of the Middle Ages. The Scholastic mode of thought split into two currents: Realism and Nominalism. It is an apparently abstract subject, but for the Middle Ages, and even for later times, this conflict acquired a deep significance — a theological, as well as a secular, significance.\nScientists are divided into these two camps. Nominalists means those who believed in names; Realists are those who believe in actuality. Realists, in the sense of the Middle Ages, were those who believed in the reality of thought, in a real meaning, to the universe. They assumed that the world has a meaning and did not come into being by chance. From the standpoint of materialism this may seem a foolish point of view; but one who does not regard this thought as an empty flight of fancy, must admit that the idea of a cosmic law, which men seek and find within themselves, has significance also for the world.\nThe Nominalists were those who did not believe that thoughts are anything real, who saw therein only names given at random, things of no significance. All those who think to see, in what human thinking achieves, mere blind fortuity — those like Kent, and Schopenhauer, who conceives the world as idea — form an outgrowth from mediaeval nominalism.\nThese currents divided the army of monks into two camps. It is noteworthy that in such weighty matters, the Church exercises no compulsion, and, so far as learning is concerned, calmly affirms that the question may be raised whether the divine Trinity is not also only a name — and that consequently nothing is real. Nevertheless, you see from this the wide freedom of the mediaeval Church. Not until the end of this period do the persecutions of heretics begin; and it is significant that the first inquisitor in Germany, Conrad of Marburg, was assassinated by the populace. It was then that beliefs began to be persecuted. This is an important change of front. How free ecclesiastical thinking had been before, you can see from the great teacher and thinker, Albertus Magnus (1193–1280). He was a man conspicuous for learning, delving deeply into every kind of science; he had mastered ecclesiastical scholarship, Arabian knowledge, natural history and physics. The people regarded him as a magician. Learning and popular superstition exploited by the secularises clergy, jostled each other severely.\nNow the cities come to the fore. Here we see the rise of a powerful citizen class. Manufactures flourish, and guilds are formed. NO longer need the artisan stop beneath the oppression of the lords of the manor, as the serfs were wont to do. Soon kings and princes form alliances with the mediaeval cities.\nThe Emperor Frederic Barbarosa fought for years with the cities of North Italy. A strong feeling of freedom and a sense of definite personal value developed among the citizens. Thus, on the one hand, we see, in the country, religious conviction together with increasing external oppression; and, in the towns, a free citizenship. The citizens were bound, it is true, by a strictly regulated guild organisation; yet that in itself contributed to the freedom of the cities, whereas life in the country was witherin away under club law and brutality. After the Crusades the knights lapsed into an empty court life, leading nowhere. They occupied themselves with feuds, tournaments and passages of arms; their manners became more and more rough. As time went on, the pursuit of love, in particular, assumed most ridiculous forms. Knights who could write poems composed odes to their lady loves; others paid court to them in different ways. Great ignorance was combined with this court life. The men were almost all uneducated; the woman had to be able to read and write. The women occupied a peculiar position; on the one hand, they were idolised; on the other, they were enslaved. A kind of barbarism prevailed, and unbridled life, wherein the ravishing of women was included in the customs of hospitality.\nMeanwhile, that which was later called culture, was growing up in the cities. What was happening there, was bound to happen; for new contingencies arise, wherever it is possible to construct in freedom. Real spiritual progress takes place when the industrial life is not cramped. Not that spiritual progress springs from material progress, but true spiritual progress is found where industrial life is not oppressed and confined.\nThus, at this epoch, a rich cultural life made its appearance in the cities; nearly all that has come to us in works of art, in architecture and discoveries, we owe to this period of city culture. It was from such a rich Italian city culture that Dante rose. In Germany, too, we find important intellectual achievements under this influence. True, the first notable poets, such as Wolfram von Eshenbach, Gottfried von Stassburg, etc., were knights; but without the restraint offered by the cities, these achievements would not have been possible. At the same time, when the breath of freedom was blowing in the cities, University life also sprang up. At first, when a German wished to find higher knowledge, he had to go to Italy, France, etc. Now there arose in Germany itself, the first Universities: Prague (1348), Vienna (1365), Heidelberg (1386). Freedom dispersed the mediaeval gloom.\nThe secularised clergy were entangled, like the princes, in wars of self-interest; and the Church had assumed this characteristic. Following the course of these developments, one realises that the new spiritual current, German mysticism, could only arise in this way — in stark opposition to the secularised clergy. This movement spread particularly along the Rhine, in Cologne, Strassburg and South Germany. To it belonged men like Eckhardt, Tauler, Suso, etc. They had made themselves independent of the Roman clergy, and were therefore declared heretics; life was made difficult for them in every way. A spiritual trait runs through their writings. They had withdrawn into their human heart, in order to come to a clear understanding of themselves. These independent monks spoke to the heart of the people in an extraordinarily edifying way, in a language unintelligible today, unless one reads the writings of a Master Eckhardt or Tauler. The beauty of the language was implanted in it by mysticism, and the contemporary translations far excelled the later ones in beauty of language. This development of the German language was sharply interrupted by Luther, who produced the German Bible in the most pedantic philistine idiom of the period, out of which the modern High German has grown. All this took place in opposition to the clergy. What was wished for at that time has, in many departments, not yet been reached. It es always asserted that Luther's translation of the Bible represented something unprecedented, but you see that far greater heights had been reached before.\nWe are nearing the time of the Renaissance. The consolidation of relationships, which had been achieved, consisted essentially in ever larger territories coming under the authority of the ruling princes. Also, a considerable part of the mediaeval freedom of the cities was absorbed into the constitution of the great States. Much is said nowadays of the despotism which prevailed at that time. Freedom has, of course, its seamy side; and it is not freedom if a man's freewill is limited by the freewill of others.\nIn the middle of this mediaeval period, there was opposition in the Universities to the arbitrariness of those in secular power, just as, later, perhaps Fichte alone voiced it. The documents of the mediaeval Universities preserve for us the words of the free spirits of those days. Today, not only the secular government, but Science, too, is State-controlled.\nI have sketched this epoch without allotting light and shade, according to the catchwords of the present day. I tried to dwell on the points where real progress was made. If we wish to be free, we must have a heart for those who have striven for freedom before us. We must understand that other ages, too, produced men who set store by freedom.\nHistory is the story of man's evolution to freedom; and in order to understand it we must study the culminating points of all freedom."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-12",
+    "title": "History of the Middle Ages IX",
+    "date": "28 Dec 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19041228c01.html",
+    "book_title": "Philosophy, History and Literature",
+    "content": "We have seen how the life of the Middle Ages developed in the cities.\nWe have come to the point where public life takes place mainly in the life of cities. Originally the inducement to settle in the cities was the oppression of the country people and the spread of commerce.\nWe have seen how those who escaped their oppressors or devoted themselves to trade settled either in a bishop's see or in some other site of medieval power. At first, the part of the population that inhabited the cities was not in a pleasant position; they had to pay dues to their former lord of the manor, supply weapons, clothes and so on. Those who had moved to the cities and devoted themselves to trade, as well as those who were royal, episcopal or other officials, at first formed the actually free privileged classes. But more and more the privileges of the officials and the merchants who formed the patriciate were taken away from the privileged by those who lived depressed. On the Rhine in southern Germany, this equality was won in the 13th and 14th centuries. Kings and emperors reckoned with it.\nEarlier the wandering kings had held court soon here soon there, now they settled in the cities. The rulers had to reckon with the cities, they found in them reason to develop their own power. Therefore, certain rights were given to the cities, jurisdiction, right to mint coins and so on. In this way their power grew more and more. A democratic element was now formed in Germany. In the past, the basic nobility, the feudal nobility, had given the time its certain character. Instead, something new has arisen. More and more privileges were eliminated in the cities. Instead of making general observations, let us turn to specific examples. Cologne had long been an important trading city, the seat of a powerful clergy; in the spiritual sphere, too, the cities were becoming a power. There, the subordinate class soon acquired equal rights with the patrician class, a kind of constitution, the oath book, in which was recorded what rights each individual had. The guilds, of which there were twenty-two in Cologne, had joined together, and before the 14th century they had also been dependent on the patricians here. Now, in 1321, these conquered equal rights.\nThe city council was not only composed of patricians, but the members of the guilds had equal voting rights. In order to make this council as democratic as possible, the members were always to be elected for only half a year, after which they were to be ineligible for three years. With the implementation of the democratic principle, the interest of the individual citizen in the flourishing of the cities also grew. Until the 12th century, such cities were not much other than dirty villages with thatched houses. But we see them growing in quite a striking way in a few years. Every man is now a citizen, and with the participation of the individual grows the prestige and beauty of the city.\nWhat the cities indicated had a determining effect also on the whole high politics. What could interest cities like Hamburg, Lübeck, Cologne politically, as kings and dukes used to do outside? When the cities began to do politics, it was done in the urban way. Wide areas allied to protect their urban interests. Such powerful alliances of cities were first formed in northern Germany, and later the northern Italian cities also formed such alliances. The German cities also gained significant influence abroad; in Bergen, in London they had their powerful guildhall.\nAs the princes had to decide to grant the cities the right to such politics, so the cities also gradually became the center of a new culture. A material culture, to be sure, but one that led to the settlement of wider areas. New cultural centers were formed, in which a lively trade with the northern countries, especially with Russia, flourished; the legendary Vineta was such a trading center. We see how trade policy developed, powerful trade routes emerged, along the Rhine, through northern and central Germany, with important trading cities such as Magdeburg, Hildesheim, Erfurt, Breslau and so on. From these alliances of cities emerged what is called the Hansa. In the course of time, it became necessary to pursue not only trade but also war policy. In the background lurked enemies, the knights and dukes, who enviously followed the development of the cities. The cities had to surround themselves with walls and defend themselves against their enemies. Thus they became more and more powerful cultural centers, also centers of spiritual life. Whatever spiritual life was felt in those days was drawn together in the cities. Art also blossomed in the medieval cities under the influence of the free bourgeoisie. In Venice, the Hall of Clothiers is painted by Titian.\nA new form of warfare also emerged. By the application of the powder, whose use was known already earlier in the Orient, but was found only now for Europe, a new, the democratic form of the fight arises opposite to the single fight of the armored knights. The use of gunpowder continues to develop. First there were crude blunderbusses and mortars, but soon more perfect weapons were invented, especially by Kaspar Zöllner in Vienna. What developed especially in the cities in connection with the spirit of ecclesiastical life is of special importance for the progress of culture. We have seen how the highest ecstasy of the religious enthusiasm presents itself in the crusades. We have seen how German mysticism blossomed, especially on the Rhine, how the brothers of the common life cultivated a deep piety completely independent of Rome. Two different currents of time now confront us: on the one hand, the bourgeois is concerned with the elevation of material life; on the other hand, we see here a spiritual life directed inwardly. In the early Middle Ages, material and spiritual life were closely intertwined; the prosperity of its fruits, like his religious feeling, the peasant believed to be supported and blessed by the church. Now that personal efficiency came to the fore, these directions split. The peculiar architectural style of the Middle Ages, mistakenly called Gothic, came from the south of France, originated in areas where lived such pious heretics as the Cathars, the Waldenses, who strove to deepen the inner life and break with the lavish life of the bishops and the clergy. A peculiar spiritual life spreads from there; German mysticism is strongly influenced by it. What a profound influence this attitude had on the outer form of these churches is evident from the fact that all these Gothic minsters possessed a mystical decoration in the marvelous stained-glass windows. This art, which was completely lost in the 17th century, was not artistic allegory, but the symbols that were painted there really exerted a mystical influence on the crowd when the sunshine shone through them into the dim high churches. This type of construction was closely related to the conditions of the medieval cities; the town hall and the guildhall were also Gothic. The city, which was surrounded by walls, was dependent on expanding within these walls, the Romanesque architectural style was not sufficient for this. This is how the towering Gothic churches came into being, an expression at the same time of the inwardness of the life of the time; the dances of the dead that often adorned them brought to mind the transience of everything earthly. In caring for the cleanliness and beauty of their city, the citizens find a noble way to keep their name in the memory of their fellow citizens. Especially beautiful fountains are erected everywhere. We see that at that time something comes into being which acquired special importance in the Middle Ages, the public baths, which were not lacking in any town. In the later Middle Ages, these baths gave rise to moral outrages and for this reason were eradicated by Protestantism. But this civic spirit went even further, it intervened in public life by creating charitable institutions that can still be considered models today. And these charitable institutions were also urgently needed, because in the 14th century Europe was afflicted by severe plagues, famines, leprosy, the plague or, as it was called at that time, \"the black death\". But medieval man knew how to counter this. Infirmaries, hospitals, and priests' houses were built everywhere, and even strangers were cared for in the so-called slum hostels. Misery was then synonymous with stranger and only later acquired a different meaning. In addition to these bright sides of medieval life, there were, of course, some dark ones. Above all, the harsh treatment of all those who did not belong to a fixed community. They were outcasts, something for which the cities did not pay. All those who did not belong to the guild had to suffer bad treatment. Especially the \"traveling people\". The name \"dishonest people\" was created at that time, a terrible name for the traveling people. The dishonest people included all kinds of professions, actors, jugglers, shepherds and so on. They were not allowed to join the guilds, they could not show themselves anywhere without the risk of being tortured. The same happened to the Jews. The prejudice against them is not very old. In the early Middle Ages we find many Jews recognized as scholars. In later times they met the money needs of princes and knights. Due to the peculiar conditions of the Middle Ages, they attained the position of money lenders, which stood between commerce and usury and earned them hatred. However, the kings' need for money always gave them certain rights; this activity earned them the strange name of royal chamberlains. Another dark side was the judicial system, the criminal law that necessarily came up with the Middle Ages. In earlier times, justice was really related to revenge, either a damage should be repaired, or revenge should be taken. The concept of punishment did not exist, it came up only now. Roman legal concepts were becoming established. Judicial power was a valuable prerogative of a city and the citizens were proud not only of their churches and walls, but also of their high court. Often the harshest punishments were imposed for the most trivial of causes. So the 15th and 16th centuries of medieval life is under the influence of urban life. Another current went alongside it. What we understand today as great politics was related to this other current. This is the movement known as that of the heretics or Cathars. You can gauge the extent to which this took hold if you consider the fact that in Italy in the 13th century there were more heretics than orthodox. Here also lay the real conflict that led to the Crusades. When at the church meeting in Clermont in 1095 the decision was taken to launch them, it was not only riffraff, no, it was also decent people who set out in disorderly crowds under Peter of Amiens and the knight Walter von Habenichts for the promised land. It was a papal enterprise, it was not merely born of enthusiasm. It was a matter of the papal influence being pressed by the heretics. The pope's endeavor was, what actually took place, to thus create a drain for the heretics. In the first real crusade, it was largely heretics who set out. This is also evident from the person of the leader. Gottfried von Bouillon was of a decidedly anti-papal disposition, as can be seen from his previous life. For when, at the instigation of Pope Gregory, a counter-king was set up against Henry IV in the person of Duke Rudolf of Swabia, Gottfried of Bouillon fought on the side of Emperor Henry and killed Rudolf of Swabia. It is necessary to see what it was about for him, but which did not come to execution: to found an anti-Rome in Jerusalem. That is why he called himself only \"Protector of the Holy Sepulchre\" and tried to raise the flag of anti-Roman Christianity in Jerusalem with unpretentious modesty. After the Crusades, the Ghibelline party arose from the representatives of such views; opposite them, on the side of the Pope, stood the Guelfs. Also when we consider the second crusade, undertaken in 1147 by Emperor Conrad III at the instigation of Bernard of Clairvaux, we see the same phenomena. These crusades had no further significance in themselves, they only showed what spirit was blowing through the world. Barbarossa, who undertook five Roman campaigns against the Pope and the northern Italian cities that sided with him, in order to force them down, was forced to grant them independence in the Peace of Constance after he failed to take their fortress of Alessandria. The German papal party was composed especially of the princely families who had remained behind from the old nobility. Henry the Proud and his son Henry the Lion fought for the old ducal power against the imperial power. Usually, by marriage with an emperor's daughter, these recalcitrant princes were then bound to the imperial power. By the enfeoffment of relatives of the emperor with finished dukedoms such rearrangements of the power relations were brought about again and again in the consequence. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa undertook the third crusade, which also led to no real successes, but which became important through the Kyffhäuser saga, which tied itself to it. Those who can read legends know that they are dealing with one of the most important ones. It did not originate from the soul of the people, as it is usually said, because only the individual wrote poems and then what he produced spread among the people, as it also happens with the folk song, of which professors claim that it originates directly from the people and does not come from the heads of individuals. The legend originated from the mind of a man who knew how to use symbols that had a deep meaning, such as the cave in Kyffhäuser, the ravens and so on. It is one of the legends that can be found all over the world, a proof that there is something similar everywhere. The Barbarossa saga is a very important saga from the point of view of cultural history. - Rome was in the church the advocate of what resulted from the, the Germanic spirit in connection with Christianity imposed external accessory. - In a grotto the emperor was supposed to be hidden. From time immemorial grottoes were secret places of worship. Thus the Mithras service was generally held in grottoes. In this worship, Mithras was depicted on the bull, the symbol of the lower animal nature, which was overcome by Mithras, the predecessor of Christ. In the Kyffhäuser legend, the emperor hidden in the rocky grotto became the advocate of that which turned against Rome and its influence in German spiritual life. How much there is in this legend! A pure Christianity, longed for by many at the time, was to emerge from hiding when the time came. It was under the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II that the Mongol invasion occurred that devastated Europe. It is not a history of the Hohenstaufens that I wish to give you here, only to hint at what developed from the Crusades: expanded trade relations, a revival of the sciences and arts through contact with the Orient. What the crusaders gained in new experiences and goods, they brought back home. It was also then that the two great monastic orders came into being that became of particular importance for spiritual life, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The Dominicans represented the spiritual direction known as realism, while the Franciscans leaned toward nominalism. In the Holy Land also happened the foundation of the spiritual orders of knighthood; the Order of St. John was initially founded for the care of the sick. From a similar mood to that which I have described to you as that of Gottfried von Bouillon, the second order of knights, that of the Templars, emerged. Its real aims were kept secret, but through intimate agitators the order had soon become very powerful. An anti-Roman principle prevailed in it, as was also evident in the Dominicans, who were often in complete opposition to Rome; thus they were in violent opposition to the Pope on the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The Templars sought to purify Christianity. Referring to John the Baptist, they advocated an ascetic tendency. Their acts of worship were so hostile to the church out of resistance to the Roman secularization that it is not appropriate to speak about it publicly today. The order had become very inconvenient to the clergy and princes because of its power, it had to suffer severe persecutions and perished after its last Grand Master, Jacob of Molay, had suffered martyrdom with a number of brothers of the order in 1314. The \"German Order of Knights\" was also of similar origin. With the Order of the Brothers of the Sword, which joined it, it made it its special task to convert the areas of Europe that still remained pagan, especially in the East, from its headquarters in Marienburg. From the reports of contemporaries, one gets a strange picture of the inhabitants of the areas that today form the provinces of East and West Prussia. Albert von Bremen describes the old Prussians as complete heathens. Among this people, of whom it is not exactly certain whether they were of Germanic or Slavic stock, are found the old pagan customs of eating horse meat and drinking horse blood. The chronicler describes them as pagan cruel people. Before coming into contact with the German knights, the Brothers of the Sword had especially aspired to worldly violence. One can only construct the development. Although the cities had formed, a part of the ducal power and the robbery knighthood had remained. It was not enthusiasm for Christianity, but mere egoism that caused the remnants of the feudal nobility to gather in these two German orders of knights. In these areas, no significant influence of the cities was felt. The other two Christian orders were compounds of those who were not connected with Rome. If you study the historical sources, you will often find alliances between them and the cities. Besides these two currents of urban development and deeper religious life, we see that the imperial power lost all importance. In the years 1254 to 1273 there was no bearer of imperial power in Germany; the imperial dignity was temporarily sold to foreign princes, one of whom, Richard of Cornwall, came to Germany only twice, while the second, Alfonso of Castile, never entered it at all. When at last one again proceeded to a proper election of emperors, the endeavor was not to establish any central imperial power or to attempt once more to create an imperial power, but the desire was decisive to bring order with regard to the robber baronry. So they chose Count Rudolf of Habsburg. If one is to ask what he and his successors did for the empire, it would be difficult to say, for they were not active in public affairs. They were busy establishing their domestic power. Thus, after the death of Duke Heinrich Jasomirgott, Rudolf of Habsburg granted Lower Austria to his son and thus established the Habsburg house power. His successors sought to increase this power by conquests and especially by marriage treaties, and no longer cared about anything connected with general interests. You see what was really significant for the further development: the events that resulted in the medieval conditions what finally led to the great discoveries and inventions at the end of the Middle Ages. We see the cities with powerfully rising, but secularized culture; in the church we see the divorce, the schism, the separation; out of this current the last act of the medieval drama dawns, we see the twilight of the Middle Ages, the dawn of a new time.\nWhat developed especially in the cities in connection with the spirit of ecclesiastical life is of special importance for the progress of culture. We have seen how the highest ecstasy of the religious enthusiasm presents itself in the crusades. We have seen how German mysticism blossomed, especially on the Rhine, how the brothers of the common life cultivated a deep piety completely independent of Rome. Two different currents of time now confront us: on the one hand, the bourgeois is concerned with the elevation of material life; on the other hand, we see here a spiritual life directed inwardly. In the early Middle Ages, material and spiritual life were closely intertwined; the prosperity of its fruits, like his religious feeling, the peasant believed to be supported and blessed by the church. Now that personal efficiency came to the fore, these directions split.\nThe peculiar architectural style of the Middle Ages, mistakenly called Gothic, came from the south of France, originated in areas where lived such pious heretics as the Cathars, the Waldenses, who strove to deepen the inner life and break with the lavish life of the bishops and the clergy. A peculiar spiritual life spreads from there; German mysticism is strongly influenced by it.\nWhat a profound influence this attitude had on the outer form of these churches is evident from the fact that all these Gothic minsters possessed a mystical decoration in the marvelous stained-glass windows. This art, which was completely lost in the 17th century, was not artistic allegory, but the symbols that were painted there really exerted a mystical influence on the crowd when the sunshine shone through them into the dim high churches. This type of construction was closely related to the conditions of the medieval cities; the town hall and the guildhall were also Gothic. The city, which was surrounded by walls, was dependent on expanding within these walls, the Romanesque architectural style was not sufficient for this. This is how the towering Gothic churches came into being, an expression at the same time of the inwardness of the life of the time; the dances of the dead that often adorned them brought to mind the transience of everything earthly.\nIn caring for the cleanliness and beauty of their city, the citizens find a noble way to keep their name in the memory of their fellow citizens. Especially beautiful fountains are erected everywhere. We see that at that time something comes into being which acquired special importance in the Middle Ages, the public baths, which were not lacking in any town. In the later Middle Ages, these baths gave rise to moral outrages and for this reason were eradicated by Protestantism. But this civic spirit went even further, it intervened in public life by creating charitable institutions that can still be considered models today. And these charitable institutions were also urgently needed, because in the 14th century Europe was afflicted by severe plagues, famines, leprosy, the plague or, as it was called at that time, \"the black death\". But medieval man knew how to counter this. Infirmaries, hospitals, and priests' houses were built everywhere, and even strangers were cared for in the so-called slum hostels. Misery was then synonymous with stranger and only later acquired a different meaning.\nIn addition to these bright sides of medieval life, there were, of course, some dark ones. Above all, the harsh treatment of all those who did not belong to a fixed community. They were outcasts, something for which the cities did not pay. All those who did not belong to the guild had to suffer bad treatment. Especially the \"traveling people\". The name \"dishonest people\" was created at that time, a terrible name for the traveling people. The dishonest people included all kinds of professions, actors, jugglers, shepherds and so on. They were not allowed to join the guilds, they could not show themselves anywhere without the risk of being tortured. The same happened to the Jews. The prejudice against them is not very old. In the early Middle Ages we find many Jews recognized as scholars. In later times they met the money needs of princes and knights. Due to the peculiar conditions of the Middle Ages, they attained the position of money lenders, which stood between commerce and usury and earned them hatred. However, the kings' need for money always gave them certain rights; this activity earned them the strange name of royal chamberlains. Another dark side was the judicial system, the criminal law that necessarily came up with the Middle Ages. In earlier times, justice was really related to revenge, either a damage should be repaired, or revenge should be taken. The concept of punishment did not exist, it came up only now. Roman legal concepts were becoming established. Judicial power was a valuable prerogative of a city and the citizens were proud not only of their churches and walls, but also of their high court. Often the harshest punishments were imposed for the most trivial of causes.\nSo the 15th and 16th centuries of medieval life is under the influence of urban life. Another current went alongside it. What we understand today as great politics was related to this other current. This is the movement known as that of the heretics or Cathars. You can gauge the extent to which this took hold if you consider the fact that in Italy in the 13th century there were more heretics than orthodox.\nHere also lay the real conflict that led to the Crusades. When at the church meeting in Clermont in 1095 the decision was taken to launch them, it was not only riffraff, no, it was also decent people who set out in disorderly crowds under Peter of Amiens and the knight Walter von Habenichts for the promised land. It was a papal enterprise, it was not merely born of enthusiasm. It was a matter of the papal influence being pressed by the heretics. The pope's endeavor was, what actually took place, to thus create a drain for the heretics.\nIn the first real crusade, it was largely heretics who set out. This is also evident from the person of the leader. Gottfried von Bouillon was of a decidedly anti-papal disposition, as can be seen from his previous life. For when, at the instigation of Pope Gregory, a counter-king was set up against Henry IV in the person of Duke Rudolf of Swabia, Gottfried of Bouillon fought on the side of Emperor Henry and killed Rudolf of Swabia. It is necessary to see what it was about for him, but which did not come to execution: to found an anti-Rome in Jerusalem. That is why he called himself only \"Protector of the Holy Sepulchre\" and tried to raise the flag of anti-Roman Christianity in Jerusalem with unpretentious modesty. After the Crusades, the Ghibelline party arose from the representatives of such views; opposite them, on the side of the Pope, stood the Guelfs.\nAlso when we consider the second crusade, undertaken in 1147 by Emperor Conrad III at the instigation of Bernard of Clairvaux, we see the same phenomena. These crusades had no further significance in themselves, they only showed what spirit was blowing through the world. Barbarossa, who undertook five Roman campaigns against the Pope and the northern Italian cities that sided with him, in order to force them down, was forced to grant them independence in the Peace of Constance after he failed to take their fortress of Alessandria.\nThe German papal party was composed especially of the princely families who had remained behind from the old nobility. Henry the Proud and his son Henry the Lion fought for the old ducal power against the imperial power. Usually, by marriage with an emperor's daughter, these recalcitrant princes were then bound to the imperial power. By the enfeoffment of relatives of the emperor with finished dukedoms such rearrangements of the power relations were brought about again and again in the consequence.\nEmperor Frederick Barbarossa undertook the third crusade, which also led to no real successes, but which became important through the Kyffhäuser saga, which tied itself to it. Those who can read legends know that they are dealing with one of the most important ones. It did not originate from the soul of the people, as it is usually said, because only the individual wrote poems and then what he produced spread among the people, as it also happens with the folk song, of which professors claim that it originates directly from the people and does not come from the heads of individuals. The legend originated from the mind of a man who knew how to use symbols that had a deep meaning, such as the cave in Kyffhäuser, the ravens and so on. It is one of the legends that can be found all over the world, a proof that there is something similar everywhere.\nThe Barbarossa saga is a very important saga from the point of view of cultural history. - Rome was in the church the advocate of what resulted from the, the Germanic spirit in connection with Christianity imposed external accessory. - In a grotto the emperor was supposed to be hidden. From time immemorial grottoes were secret places of worship. Thus the Mithras service was generally held in grottoes. In this worship, Mithras was depicted on the bull, the symbol of the lower animal nature, which was overcome by Mithras, the predecessor of Christ. In the Kyffhäuser legend, the emperor hidden in the rocky grotto became the advocate of that which turned against Rome and its influence in German spiritual life. How much there is in this legend! A pure Christianity, longed for by many at the time, was to emerge from hiding when the time came.\nIt was under the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II that the Mongol invasion occurred that devastated Europe. It is not a history of the Hohenstaufens that I wish to give you here, only to hint at what developed from the Crusades: expanded trade relations, a revival of the sciences and arts through contact with the Orient. What the crusaders gained in new experiences and goods, they brought back home.\nIt was also then that the two great monastic orders came into being that became of particular importance for spiritual life, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The Dominicans represented the spiritual direction known as realism, while the Franciscans leaned toward nominalism. In the Holy Land also happened the foundation of the spiritual orders of knighthood; the Order of St. John was initially founded for the care of the sick.\nFrom a similar mood to that which I have described to you as that of Gottfried von Bouillon, the second order of knights, that of the Templars, emerged. Its real aims were kept secret, but through intimate agitators the order had soon become very powerful. An anti-Roman principle prevailed in it, as was also evident in the Dominicans, who were often in complete opposition to Rome; thus they were in violent opposition to the Pope on the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The Templars sought to purify Christianity. Referring to John the Baptist, they advocated an ascetic tendency. Their acts of worship were so hostile to the church out of resistance to the Roman secularization that it is not appropriate to speak about it publicly today. The order had become very inconvenient to the clergy and princes because of its power, it had to suffer severe persecutions and perished after its last Grand Master, Jacob of Molay, had suffered martyrdom with a number of brothers of the order in 1314.\nThe \"German Order of Knights\" was also of similar origin. With the Order of the Brothers of the Sword, which joined it, it made it its special task to convert the areas of Europe that still remained pagan, especially in the East, from its headquarters in Marienburg. From the reports of contemporaries, one gets a strange picture of the inhabitants of the areas that today form the provinces of East and West Prussia. Albert von Bremen describes the old Prussians as complete heathens. Among this people, of whom it is not exactly certain whether they were of Germanic or Slavic stock, are found the old pagan customs of eating horse meat and drinking horse blood. The chronicler describes them as pagan cruel people.\nBefore coming into contact with the German knights, the Brothers of the Sword had especially aspired to worldly violence.\nOne can only construct the development. Although the cities had formed, a part of the ducal power and the robbery knighthood had remained. It was not enthusiasm for Christianity, but mere egoism that caused the remnants of the feudal nobility to gather in these two German orders of knights. In these areas, no significant influence of the cities was felt. The other two Christian orders were compounds of those who were not connected with Rome. If you study the historical sources, you will often find alliances between them and the cities.\nBesides these two currents of urban development and deeper religious life, we see that the imperial power lost all importance. In the years 1254 to 1273 there was no bearer of imperial power in Germany; the imperial dignity was temporarily sold to foreign princes, one of whom, Richard of Cornwall, came to Germany only twice, while the second, Alfonso of Castile, never entered it at all.\nWhen at last one again proceeded to a proper election of emperors, the endeavor was not to establish any central imperial power or to attempt once more to create an imperial power, but the desire was decisive to bring order with regard to the robber baronry.\nSo they chose Count Rudolf of Habsburg. If one is to ask what he and his successors did for the empire, it would be difficult to say, for they were not active in public affairs. They were busy establishing their domestic power. Thus, after the death of Duke Heinrich Jasomirgott, Rudolf of Habsburg granted Lower Austria to his son and thus established the Habsburg house power. His successors sought to increase this power by conquests and especially by marriage treaties, and no longer cared about anything connected with general interests.\nYou see what was really significant for the further development: the events that resulted in the medieval conditions what finally led to the great discoveries and inventions at the end of the Middle Ages. We see the cities with powerfully rising, but secularized culture; in the church we see the divorce, the schism, the separation; out of this current the last act of the medieval drama dawns, we see the twilight of the Middle Ages, the dawn of a new time."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-13",
+    "title": "History of the Middle Ages X",
+    "date": "29 Dec 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19041229c01.html",
+    "book_title": "Philosophy, History and Literature",
+    "content": "We are progressing more and more in the contemplation of history to the times when the great inventions and discoveries happened in the 15th century.\nThe new time begins. For a historical consideration this new time has special interest; in characteristic features the transition to the great state formations of Europe takes place. We have seen how from the feudal power the transition to the modern princely power develops. On the one hand it means a reaction of old remnants from earlier times and only in a certain way a renewal. That which remained of the old claims of princes and dukes, what was left, gathers its forces again and determines the map of Europe through its family private relations.\nThe landed property had been replaced in its domination by the cities, the bourgeoisie flourished and all the real cultural factors emanated from the cities. The emperorship had sunk to a shadow power; after a long interregnum Rudolf of Habsburg was elected, but the emperor had become very unnecessary in the empire; he hardly needed to be seen there. The Habsburg dynasty only endeavored to increase its domestic power through this imperial power, wherever rights remained to it outside the power of the cities. It is a simple process that takes place here, also the rest - princes and dukes - gather what remained to them to strengthen their house power, creating the basis for large political territories.\nThe Mongol invasion, later the invasions of the Turks, give rise to this. Only larger princes are able to defend their territories; the smaller ones join the more powerful one and thus form the basis for future states. The new emperor meant very little. As mentioned, Rudolf of Habsburg was only anxious to establish a domestic power. After overcoming Ottokar of Bohemia, his son was enfeoffed with his lands, and later the Habsburg house power was strengthened by always marrying new territories to it.\nOnly the process of all these purely private undertakings can interest us, that it came to the uprising of the Swiss Confederates, who wanted to be free from the claims, which the successor of Rudolf of Habsburg, Emperor Albrecht I, made on them. Through hard struggles they obtained to be dependent only on imperial power - imperial immediacy; they did not want to know anything about princely power.\nThe endeavor to increase one's own house power continues under the following emperors; thus Adolf of Nassau seizes a large part of Thuringia, which he wrests from the weaker princes. Albrecht of Austria and his successor Henry of Luxembourg also seek to enrich themselves in this way, the latter by marrying his son to a Bohemian princess. This is a typical case of the development of the conditions of the time.\nThis current continued under new growth of ecclesiastical power, but at the same time there was also a growth of the current that wanted to have nothing to do with the Church. The teachings of the Waldenses or Cathars had a stirring effect, there were tremendous struggles against the reemerging princely power. The situation of the peasants, which had been lifted by the emergence of the cities, now became more and more oppressive because of the feudal and robber baronies, the bishoprics and abbeys, to which they had to be in thrall. The cities had had a time of bloom, at that time the principle had applied: City air makes free. - But in the course of time many cities had become dependent, especially the Hohenstaufen had succeeded in bringing many cities into dependence. Now the cities tried to keep off further influx, they made an end of it and looked for princely protection. As a result, the peasant population became more dependent on their landlords. The mood of the oppressed was stirred up by the Waldensians and heretics, for whom the church was no longer sufficient.\nThe cry for freedom and the Christian-heretical mood went hand in hand; religious sentiment merged with political movement and this popular mood found its expression in the peasant wars. Whoever wants to grasp this spiritual heretic mood independent of external church and princely power, must realize that especially in the Rhine regions - \"the Holy Roman Empire's alley of the priests\" - hard battles were waged by the princely power against this current for decades. Popular preachers, especially those from the Dominican Order, resisted, and even fought, because they did not want to submit to the oppression of the people by the papal power. They do not agree with the political expansion of power of the papacy and the expansion of the power of the princes. The French kings saw in the papacy a support in the struggle with the German princely power. So the pope was led to Avignon and during about seventy years the popes had their seat there. Henry of Luxembourg fought with the Pope, to whom the King of France lent his support. Thus, from Avignon, from France, the pope now dominates Christendom, and as the princes increasingly assert their power over their feudatories, so the popes strive for ever greater extension of their authority. The secular clergy, the power-owning abbeys and bishoprics were dependent on the pope. Meanwhile, the princes arbitrarily shaped the map of Europe. Emperor Charles IV united Brandenburg, Hungary and Bohemia under his household power. The imperial dignity has become a titulature, the emperors are content to administer their private lands, the imperial title is bartered away by the princes. If we want to understand the real history, we must keep in mind how the great change from the Middle Ages to the new age consisted in the princes using for their private interests that discontented mood; the states that are formed we see spreading their tentacles over a centuries-old popular current, and it is this current for religious liberty that is used first to fight the papacy and to stop its power, and then to creep itself into that position of power. That current developed at the bottom of the popular soul; it aspired to something quite different from what the Reformation then brought. The secularized clergy had become as much of an oppressor as the secular princes. The urban population, in their egoism, did not feel compelled to side with the oppressed; only when their own freedom was threatened did they endeavor to preserve it. Thus, in the Swabian League of Cities and in the Palatinate, they did not succeed after all, so that new princely power emerged here as well. Already during the reign of Emperor Sigismund there was an outbreak in Bohemia in a peculiar religious movement. A movement that spread among a man who - one may acknowledge or deny what he represented - nevertheless relied only on his own conviction; a conviction that was based on the purest will, on the fire in his own breast. This man was John Hus of Hussonetz, the preacher and professor at the University of Prague. Based on something that was spreading throughout Europe - for even before that, in England, through Wiclif, the establishment of original Christianity had been urged - but which received special splendor through the fiery eloquence of the outstanding man, Hus found approval everywhere. Everywhere his words found acceptance, because one only had to point out the shameful behavior of the secular clergy, the sale of the bishoprics and so on. They were heartfelt words, because they proclaimed something that went through the whole of Europe as a mood and only emerged where a personality was found to give it expression. Through the popes and the counter-popes, the church had fallen into disarray; the popes themselves had to do something. Thus the Council of Constance was convened. It constituted a turning point in medieval life. A transformation into a pure church was sought. This project set in motion a lively opposition. Political motives played a part, and Emperor Sigismund himself was keenly interested. The worst abuses of the church were to be corrected, for the clergy was completely neglected, and incredible abuses had also broken out in the monasteries. In Italy, Savonarola had begun his powerful agitation against the secularization of the Church. The council also wanted to settle accounts with this. The president of the Council was Gerson, the head of the University of Paris, a second Tauler for the Romance countries. This fact was significant for the outcome of the Council, because with the help of Gerson it had become possible for the emperor to wrest the leadership from the popes and to put an end to Hussitism. Because this current had nothing to do with the development of political power, but arose from the deepest soul of the people, it was so dangerous for the spiritual and especially for the secular rulers. It is not Rome alone, it is the emerging princely power to which Hus fell victim. The Hussites waged their war for a republican Christianity not only against the church, it was waged against the approaching princely power. But in Protestantism this power allies itself with religious discontent in order to exploit it for its own purposes. The deeds of the successors of Hus were thus condemned to death that the princely power had triumphed. Otherwise, the emperors did not have special power in those times: the emperor Frederick II, for example, was commonly called the \"useless emperor.\" This gives us a picture of the peculiar development in that time. In the more and more emerging cities a flourishing life, whereas there, where the feudal power asserted itself, continuously increasing oppression; in the field of deeper religious life at the same time, influenced by these two factors, a strong movement, as it emerged in the appearance of a Wiclif, a Hus. Italy offers us a brilliant picture of that urban life in its city republics; in Florence, for example, it was the Medicean merchants who had a fundamental effect on the culture of Italy. All these cities were authoritative cultural factors. So you will understand that the means by which one otherwise attained power were no longer sufficient. In the Middle Ages, except for the number of clergymen who worked in the monasteries and in civil service positions, no one had been able to read and write. Now this relationship has become different. Reading and writing are spread by the new currents that now flood over the masses. The great writing institutes spread in copies what was formerly forbidden to the people, and these copies were bought as later books: writings of the New Testament, popular science books, books of sagas, legends, heroes and medicines were thrown into the people in the 14th century. In particular, schools had been established everywhere by the Brothers of the Common Life, as already mentioned. Along the Rhine by name, what had formerly been hidden in monasteries was now brought to light. A formal transcription industry arose in Hagenau in Alsace, whose announcements, such as those of Lamberts, are similar to today's catalogs. A sustained manuscript trade also emanated from Cologne, and the Brothers of Common Life were also called \"Brödder von de penne.\" Here we have the preparatory stage of the art of book printing. It arose from a deep need, it did not come into being as if shot from a gun, but was prepared by the fact that it had become a need, in that the books produced by copying were too expensive, but also the poorer classes of people demanded books. It was a means then of rousing the people. The men who led the peasants' cause at that time could only spread these pamphlets among the people by the fact that the conditions were favorable to them. Thus the peasants' alliances, the \"Poor Conrad\", the \"Bundschuh\" with the slogan: \"We may not recover from priests and nobility\" were formed at that time. The need for something new emanated from all sides, and when Gutenberg invented movable type around 1445, the means was given to be able to develop the cultural life of that time. The receptivity was prepared for the expansion of the field of vision. Under the influence of such moods the secularization of arts and sciences developed, and thereby the period of inventions and discoveries. Whereas formerly the church alone had been the bearer of the arts and sciences, now the cities and the bourgeoisie are the bearers of culture; from the former merely ecclesiastical culture it has been brought over and secularized. We come to the discoveries, which we can only briefly enumerate, which extended the scene of human history over vast unknown territories. In addition, there was the invasion of Greece by the Turks, through which the culture that still existed there gained influence on Europe. A great number of Greek artists and scholars emigrated to the other countries, namely to Italy, and found accommodation in the cities. They fertilized the spirit of the Occident. This reformation is called the Renaissance. Ancient Greece rose again, and only now could people get to know the scriptures on which Christianity was based. The ancient Hebrew Testament was read, thanks to Reuchlin in particular, and through him and Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the movement we know as humanism was set in motion. From the efforts initiated by these influences came the dawn of the new age. Something else resulted from the spread of Turkish violence. For a long time the Occident had been in contact with the Orient. Through the rule of the Italian cities over the seas, of which Venice was the center, it had been possible to bring the products of the Orient, especially Indian spices, to Europe. When the invasion of the Turks made the possibility of this connection more difficult for the merchants, the need arose to find another way to India around Africa. From Portugal and other southern countries, shipments went out to explore the areas around Africa, and Bartolomeo Diaz succeeded in finding the Cape of Storms, later Cape of Good Hope, and Vasco da Gama the sea route to India in 1498. This marked the beginning of a new era for European economic life, which culminated in the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492. But that belongs to the history of more modern times. So we have come to know the exit of the Middle Ages and the factors that lead over to a new time. Shaken we see the whole life in its foundations. And if one often thinks that the cuts in the historical view are chosen arbitrarily, this cut is really significant. It happened one of those \"jerks\", as we have been able to trace in the middle of the Middle Ages with the founding of cities, in the beginning with the migration of peoples. Now under the aegis of the city culture in connection of all these inventions with the great scientific conquest, which is the deed of Copernicus, a whole new culture is evoked. The secularization of the culture, a strengthening of the princely power is brought about by this current. Smaller areas had not been able to resist the devastating moves of the Turks, they had joined more powerful ones. The expansion of the great states is due to all these factors. In manifold pictures we have seen the conditions change, we have seen how the bourgeoisie arises, how it blossoms and how it is confronted with a dangerous opponent in the princely power. You know that the present is the result of the past, we shall therefore make history in the right way if we learn from the past for the present and the future in the way that comes to us in the saying of an old Celtic bard who says that it is the most beautiful music to him when he hears the great deeds of the past stirring and thrilling him. As true as it is that human existence is the most important phenomenon, and thus man himself the most worthy study, it is also true that man remains a great mystery to himself. When man realizes that he remains a mystery to himself, he will come to the right study. For only then will man face himself in right appreciation, when he knows that this is his secret: his own existence standing in connection with the all-being. This gives him the right basis for all his doing and acting. But if he wants to know something about this secret of his own existence, he must turn to science, which tells of his own striving. In world history we see how feelings and thoughts turn into actions. That is why we should learn world history, so that we can inspire our hopes, thoughts and feelings with it. Let us bring over from the past what we need for the future, what we need for life, for action!\nThe French kings saw in the papacy a support in the struggle with the German princely power. So the pope was led to Avignon and during about seventy years the popes had their seat there. Henry of Luxembourg fought with the Pope, to whom the King of France lent his support. Thus, from Avignon, from France, the pope now dominates Christendom, and as the princes increasingly assert their power over their feudatories, so the popes strive for ever greater extension of their authority. The secular clergy, the power-owning abbeys and bishoprics were dependent on the pope. Meanwhile, the princes arbitrarily shaped the map of Europe. Emperor Charles IV united Brandenburg, Hungary and Bohemia under his household power. The imperial dignity has become a titulature, the emperors are content to administer their private lands, the imperial title is bartered away by the princes.\nIf we want to understand the real history, we must keep in mind how the great change from the Middle Ages to the new age consisted in the princes using for their private interests that discontented mood; the states that are formed we see spreading their tentacles over a centuries-old popular current, and it is this current for religious liberty that is used first to fight the papacy and to stop its power, and then to creep itself into that position of power.\nThat current developed at the bottom of the popular soul; it aspired to something quite different from what the Reformation then brought. The secularized clergy had become as much of an oppressor as the secular princes. The urban population, in their egoism, did not feel compelled to side with the oppressed; only when their own freedom was threatened did they endeavor to preserve it. Thus, in the Swabian League of Cities and in the Palatinate, they did not succeed after all, so that new princely power emerged here as well.\nAlready during the reign of Emperor Sigismund there was an outbreak in Bohemia in a peculiar religious movement. A movement that spread among a man who - one may acknowledge or deny what he represented - nevertheless relied only on his own conviction; a conviction that was based on the purest will, on the fire in his own breast. This man was John Hus of Hussonetz, the preacher and professor at the University of Prague. Based on something that was spreading throughout Europe - for even before that, in England, through Wiclif, the establishment of original Christianity had been urged - but which received special splendor through the fiery eloquence of the outstanding man, Hus found approval everywhere. Everywhere his words found acceptance, because one only had to point out the shameful behavior of the secular clergy, the sale of the bishoprics and so on. They were heartfelt words, because they proclaimed something that went through the whole of Europe as a mood and only emerged where a personality was found to give it expression. Through the popes and the counter-popes, the church had fallen into disarray; the popes themselves had to do something. Thus the Council of Constance was convened. It constituted a turning point in medieval life. A transformation into a pure church was sought. This project set in motion a lively opposition. Political motives played a part, and Emperor Sigismund himself was keenly interested. The worst abuses of the church were to be corrected, for the clergy was completely neglected, and incredible abuses had also broken out in the monasteries. In Italy, Savonarola had begun his powerful agitation against the secularization of the Church. The council also wanted to settle accounts with this. The president of the Council was Gerson, the head of the University of Paris, a second Tauler for the Romance countries. This fact was significant for the outcome of the Council, because with the help of Gerson it had become possible for the emperor to wrest the leadership from the popes and to put an end to Hussitism. Because this current had nothing to do with the development of political power, but arose from the deepest soul of the people, it was so dangerous for the spiritual and especially for the secular rulers. It is not Rome alone, it is the emerging princely power to which Hus fell victim. The Hussites waged their war for a republican Christianity not only against the church, it was waged against the approaching princely power.\nBut in Protestantism this power allies itself with religious discontent in order to exploit it for its own purposes. The deeds of the successors of Hus were thus condemned to death that the princely power had triumphed. Otherwise, the emperors did not have special power in those times: the emperor Frederick II, for example, was commonly called the \"useless emperor.\"\nThis gives us a picture of the peculiar development in that time. In the more and more emerging cities a flourishing life, whereas there, where the feudal power asserted itself, continuously increasing oppression; in the field of deeper religious life at the same time, influenced by these two factors, a strong movement, as it emerged in the appearance of a Wiclif, a Hus. Italy offers us a brilliant picture of that urban life in its city republics; in Florence, for example, it was the Medicean merchants who had a fundamental effect on the culture of Italy. All these cities were authoritative cultural factors.\nSo you will understand that the means by which one otherwise attained power were no longer sufficient. In the Middle Ages, except for the number of clergymen who worked in the monasteries and in civil service positions, no one had been able to read and write. Now this relationship has become different. Reading and writing are spread by the new currents that now flood over the masses. The great writing institutes spread in copies what was formerly forbidden to the people, and these copies were bought as later books: writings of the New Testament, popular science books, books of sagas, legends, heroes and medicines were thrown into the people in the 14th century.\nIn particular, schools had been established everywhere by the Brothers of the Common Life, as already mentioned. Along the Rhine by name, what had formerly been hidden in monasteries was now brought to light. A formal transcription industry arose in Hagenau in Alsace, whose announcements, such as those of Lamberts, are similar to today's catalogs. A sustained manuscript trade also emanated from Cologne, and the Brothers of Common Life were also called \"Brödder von de penne.\"\nHere we have the preparatory stage of the art of book printing. It arose from a deep need, it did not come into being as if shot from a gun, but was prepared by the fact that it had become a need, in that the books produced by copying were too expensive, but also the poorer classes of people demanded books. It was a means then of rousing the people.\nThe men who led the peasants' cause at that time could only spread these pamphlets among the people by the fact that the conditions were favorable to them. Thus the peasants' alliances, the \"Poor Conrad\", the \"Bundschuh\" with the slogan: \"We may not recover from priests and nobility\" were formed at that time. The need for something new emanated from all sides, and when Gutenberg invented movable type around 1445, the means was given to be able to develop the cultural life of that time. The receptivity was prepared for the expansion of the field of vision. Under the influence of such moods the secularization of arts and sciences developed, and thereby the period of inventions and discoveries. Whereas formerly the church alone had been the bearer of the arts and sciences, now the cities and the bourgeoisie are the bearers of culture; from the former merely ecclesiastical culture it has been brought over and secularized.\nWe come to the discoveries, which we can only briefly enumerate, which extended the scene of human history over vast unknown territories. In addition, there was the invasion of Greece by the Turks, through which the culture that still existed there gained influence on Europe. A great number of Greek artists and scholars emigrated to the other countries, namely to Italy, and found accommodation in the cities. They fertilized the spirit of the Occident. This reformation is called the Renaissance. Ancient Greece rose again, and only now could people get to know the scriptures on which Christianity was based. The ancient Hebrew Testament was read, thanks to Reuchlin in particular, and through him and Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the movement we know as humanism was set in motion. From the efforts initiated by these influences came the dawn of the new age. Something else resulted from the spread of Turkish violence. For a long time the Occident had been in contact with the Orient. Through the rule of the Italian cities over the seas, of which Venice was the center, it had been possible to bring the products of the Orient, especially Indian spices, to Europe. When the invasion of the Turks made the possibility of this connection more difficult for the merchants, the need arose to find another way to India around Africa. From Portugal and other southern countries, shipments went out to explore the areas around Africa, and Bartolomeo Diaz succeeded in finding the Cape of Storms, later Cape of Good Hope, and Vasco da Gama the sea route to India in 1498. This marked the beginning of a new era for European economic life, which culminated in the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492. But that belongs to the history of more modern times.\nSo we have come to know the exit of the Middle Ages and the factors that lead over to a new time. Shaken we see the whole life in its foundations. And if one often thinks that the cuts in the historical view are chosen arbitrarily, this cut is really significant. It happened one of those \"jerks\", as we have been able to trace in the middle of the Middle Ages with the founding of cities, in the beginning with the migration of peoples.\nNow under the aegis of the city culture in connection of all these inventions with the great scientific conquest, which is the deed of Copernicus, a whole new culture is evoked. The secularization of the culture, a strengthening of the princely power is brought about by this current. Smaller areas had not been able to resist the devastating moves of the Turks, they had joined more powerful ones. The expansion of the great states is due to all these factors. In manifold pictures we have seen the conditions change, we have seen how the bourgeoisie arises, how it blossoms and how it is confronted with a dangerous opponent in the princely power.\nYou know that the present is the result of the past, we shall therefore make history in the right way if we learn from the past for the present and the future in the way that comes to us in the saying of an old Celtic bard who says that it is the most beautiful music to him when he hears the great deeds of the past stirring and thrilling him. As true as it is that human existence is the most important phenomenon, and thus man himself the most worthy study, it is also true that man remains a great mystery to himself. When man realizes that he remains a mystery to himself, he will come to the right study. For only then will man face himself in right appreciation, when he knows that this is his secret: his own existence standing in connection with the all-being. This gives him the right basis for all his doing and acting.\nBut if he wants to know something about this secret of his own existence, he must turn to science, which tells of his own striving. In world history we see how feelings and thoughts turn into actions. That is why we should learn world history, so that we can inspire our hopes, thoughts and feelings with it. Let us bring over from the past what we need for the future, what we need for life, for action!"
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-14",
+    "title": "Platonic Mysticism and Docta ignorantia I",
+    "date": "29 Oct 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19041029c01.html",
+    "book_title": "Philosophy, History and Literature",
+    "content": "In the rise of what we call Christian mysticism, at the time of Gnosis, mysticism was called \"Mathesis\". It was a knowledge of the world on a large scale, built on the pattern of mathematics. The mystic does not merely seek to know the external space according to inwardly gained laws, but he seeks to know all life; he engages in the study of the laws of all life. Starting from the very simplest, he ascends to the perfect. The basis of mystical thought, the fundamental concepts of mysticism, the content of what is called mysticism, is little understood, not only because it is judged merely by the external word. When one reads representations of mysticism, it is as if one were reading a representation in which angles and corners in a house are spoken of, where the mathematician actually means mathematical angles and corners. But the words of mysticism refer to contexts of life.\nWe now consider a picture of mystical imagination up to Meister Eckhart in the 13th and 14th centuries, whose sermons inspired all later mystics. We must link up there with a name that is often misjudged, that of Dionysius Areopagita. In the Acts of the Apostles we are told of a Dionysius who is said to have been a disciple of the Apostle Paul. In the 6th century, some writings appeared that are extremely stimulating for those who need a religion of the mind. They were translated from Greek into Latin, and thus they became known to the occidental spiritual life. This was done at the court of Charles the Bald by the theologian Scotus Erigena.\nToday in learned writings the works of Dionysius are usually called those of Pseudo-Dionysius. One cannot trace the writings further back than the 6th century. But since they were handed down by tradition, it can be assumed with certainty that the writings existed in the oldest times of the occidental world. In the 6th century, however, they were probably first written down.\nThe mystic thinks differently than the rationalist and materialist do. The mystic says: I look out into space, see the world of laws according to which the stars move; I grasp these laws and recreate them. So there is a re-creating power of the spirit. The thought is nothing merely imaginary for the mystic. The thought that lives in man is only a re-creating thought, in which man re-creates what creates outside in the world. The spirit, which creates outside in the world, is the same spirit, which thinks its laws in me. He sees outside in the world speaking thoughts. The creating powers of the universe have imprinted the laws on the star orbits. This spirit celebrates its self-knowledge, its rebirth in the human spirit. The mystic said to himself: In the universe outside the thought creates. By recognizing, man recognizes the objective thought outside. In man he becomes subjective thought. There is a link, which at the same time separates man in his inner experience from the outer thought and causes that the thought from outside flows into him.\nWhen we look at a crystal, the thought of a cube or some other thought is realized in the crystal. If I want to understand this thought, I must reconstruct the thought, relive it. That what lives in the external world comes into relation with me happens through the sensation from within, through the way of the eye, the sensation that relives the thoughts.\nSo we have to distinguish: First, the creating thought in the universe; second, the physicality or corporeality of man as the connecting link; third, the afterliving thought in man. - The body of man opens the gate for the creative thought to flow in from outside, and thereby to shine forth again within. The body of man forms the mediation between both thoughts, the creating and the post-creating. Man calls that which is first creating thought in nature the spirit. That which feels the thought, he calls body. That, which lives after the thought, he calls soul. - The spirit is the creator of the thought. The body is the receiver of the thought. The soul is the experiencer of the thought.\nThe creating spirit outside grasps the mystic under three terms. This is clearly stated by Arıstoteles. He has a quite strange concept of the creator of the world. He says that this world creator cannot be found directly, but is contained in every thing. If the divine spirit were present today somewhere in some form, and if we were to form a picture of the creator afterwards, we would still have only an imperfect picture of him. We must not form a definite, limited picture of the world spirit. Only in the future will we recognize what actually drives the world and sets it in motion. The world is in perpetual perfection. The one who creates in the world is the actual mover, the original mover, the unmoved mover. We must look up to him and recognize in him the elemental force that lives in everything. The primordial spirit of Aristotle moves everything in the world, but it does not live itself out completely in any being; it is the creative spirit that moves the external world, that shapes it.\nAlways something is already realized in the world. We raise our gaze to the stars of a solar system. There we find a great perfection. Thinking in terms of the theory of evolution, we must understand that this world system was not always there, but that it has been formed. Wherever we look out into the universe, we must say that it has formed up to a certain degree of perfection. In different degrees of perfection what is reached is present through the unmoved mover. One can always distinguish everywhere between what is already present, realized, and the distant, divine goal. But why does a world system, an earth, move towards this distant goal? It must have in itself a striving for the unmoved mover. In mysticism one needs a designation for this striving in the individual world system. One asked oneself, how did man strive for this unmoved mover? He directed his mind to it. The expression of this direction was always given in the contents of his religious creeds, in which still today the instruction is present to reach the unmoved mover. In the Indian world the expression of the striving was called Veda or Word. Among the Greeks it was called Logos, Word. It is the striving of man for the unmoved mover who draws us to himself. That which is realized is called the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, in the first times of Christian mysticism. That which strives toward is the Word. In Gnosticism and in Augustine, the Holy Spirit is the thought that shapes the universe. That which strives in all things to arrive at the form of the Spirit is called Logos or Word. The third is the unmoved mover itself, what the Christian mysticism of the first centuries calls the Father. This is the threefold aspect under which thought presents itself in the external world. The first Christian mysticism said: God presents himself in three masks - mask = persona, from personare, to sound through -, thus in three masks or three persons of the divine spirit. Under these three masks the spirit shows itself in the universe.\nWhat lives as spirit within man is the soul. This soul cannot create a thought for itself. It must first have the sensation of the object. Then it can mentally recreate the object in itself. Then we have the mental image in the soul; then the consciousness of the image comes to us. What lives in the soul we can represent under two aspects: the aspect of the sensation, the great stimulator, the great fertilizer; then comes what shines in the soul as mental image; that is the resting in the soul, what receives its content from outside. The resting soul, which lets itself be fertilized by the impressions from the world, is the mother. The sum of the sensations through the universe is the soul-male, the father. That which can be fertilized is the soul-feminine, the mother-soul, the eternal-feminine. That by which man becomes conscious of himself, the mystic calls the Son.\nThe aspects of the soul are: Father, Mother and Son. They correspond to the three aspects in the cosmos: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, the aspects of the world spirit.\nHaving his soul impregnated by sensation, man gives birth once again to the whole universe out of his soul as a son. This universe born out of the soul as mother the mystic calls the Christ. The man who approaches the ideal of becoming more and more conscious of the universe, approaches what the mystic calls the Christ in man. Meister Eckhart says that in the soul Christ is born. Likewise Tauler says: Christ is the universe reborn in every human being. This trinity was in ancient Egypt: Osiris, Isıs and Horus.\nThe third thing the mystic considers is the bodily self. The mystic distinguishes as his experience the three persons of the universal spiritual life as Father, Mother and Son. It is in this sense that the Meister Eckhart must be read. The recognition is for the Meister Eckhart a resurrection. He says that God has created in him an eye with which he can look at himself. When man feels himself as an organ of the Godhead, which thereby looks at itself, then he has become a mystic; a higher knowledge has then dawned on him."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-15",
+    "title": "Platonic Mysticism and Docta ignorantia I",
+    "date": "5 Nov 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19041105c01.html",
+    "book_title": "Philosophy, History and Literature",
+    "content": "We have seen that underlying the mysticism of the Middle Ages is the view of the threefoldness of human nature and of the whole universe. We have seen how the mystic imagined the spirit and the physical and the spiritual. It is in the nature of mystical imagination that the mystic experiences in the spirit what is outside in nature, that he creates from himself what is outside in nature. In all knowledge, in all inner experience he seeks a revival of the universe from the soul of man. In the laws that govern the universe, he sees the great world thoughts, world ideas. Thus he stands completely on the standpoint of the Platonic world view. Plato was the great mystic of antiquity, and all those who practiced mysticism in the Middle Ages were based on Platonism. If the mystic therefore sees in nature the creating thought, the cosmic thought, then every single thing that surrounds the mystic becomes an expression of the spiritual. He distinguishes: first, the great laws of the world, the creative thoughts; second, formless matter; third, the power which matter becomes through the spirit's activity in it. Thus: first, law or world-thought; second, matter; third, force. The force arises from the fact that the world-thought expresses itself in the matter. Nothing could be perceived with the senses, if the force did not push itself to the senses and exert an effect on the senses. In the outer physical there are therefore three members. In the soul the external arises again inwardly.\nWe distinguish in the sense of mysticism: first, the father principle, the sum of all sensations and perceptions; second, that which receives the sensation in the soul was called the soul mother; third, the consciousness itself, wherein the sensation revives, was called the son. This is the connection of sensation, mental image, and thought.\nIn the soul itself, the mystic experiences the spirit in its inwardness as spirit directly, in three members: first, the Father Spirit, the unmoved mover of Aristotle; second, the longing for the unmoved mover that lived in the soul: the Word or Logos; third, the coming to life in the spiritual world: this is the Spirit.\nThe soul can sink into itself, look spiritually, through inspiration or intuition. The mystic says: when I look out into nature, the force acts on me, and I feel the force acting on me - called energetics, the life of force. - By immersing itself in the outside world, the soul must be animated by the sensation, according to the sentence of Aristotle. He says: If I want to see the unmoved mover, I must be free from all external sensation. This immersion into the soul he calls catharsis, purification. After the catharsis, the soul unites with the spirit when it becomes intuitive, when it does not unite with sensation from the external world.\nThe henosis - union - is the immersion in the spirit, the union with the divine original spirit. This can proceed only when the soul is purified from external sensation. This purified soul, free from external sensation, the mystic calls the virgin soul, which is not fertilized by external sensation. Just as the soul is otherwise fertilized by the outer world through sensation, so it is fertilized inwardly through the idea. If the soul experiences the idea in itself, if it lets itself be virginally fertilized by the spirit, then this conception is for the mystic the immaculate, virginal conception: the conceptio immaculata. The Idea will generate in the soul not only the Son who reproduces the external world, but the Son who is the Spirit itself. The revival of the second principle of the Spirit, the Word or Logos in the virgin soul, the mystic calls the revival of the Christ principle. Thus the soul can be impregnated by sensation and give birth to the Christ in itself, which is buried in the external world, or it can be impregnated by the idea, and then the soul gives birth in itself to the spiritual Christ, the Word or Logos. Only the one who experiences the Christ, the Logos in himself, is a real participant in the Christ principle in the higher sense for the Master Eckhart. It is of no help if man knows himself united with his God, if he regards the God as an external reality, but only if he lets the Christ-principle come to life in his soul. With his teachings, the Master Eckhart made hearts glow again and again by showing people that man can become drunk if he experiences this in himself. The deepest birth of the spirit must be born from one's own soul. The mystics have all understood this. Eckhart says that what matters is not the image that has become present, but that which is always present to man. God and I are one in recognition. God became man so that I might become God. He further speaks of how in each individual human being the higher, inner human being, who leads up to the spirit, comes to life. Two people live in each one, the worldly man and the spiritual man. The inner, spiritual man goes his ways for himself.\nThe outer man can lead a life for himself; but the inner life takes its own course by allowing itself to be fertilized inwardly by the Logos. Again and again Eckhart held this up to man through his powerful sermons. The little spark in the soul is the essential. The Fünklein is an eternal One.\nWhen man experiences the revival of the Fünklein, he feels God Himself in the soul. There is an artistic expression among the mystics: the soul has let itself into the ground. - This is a connection to the image of the door with the hinge. As the hinge, on which the door turns, remains unmoved, so the inner man remains unmoved; inside he leads his own life. The inner experiencing of God is what comes about when the soul lets itself into its ground. The mystic calls the awareness of the divine life in himself the serenity (Angelus Silesius). The mystic experiences the God within himself. Through this, God is present in the person as in a dwelling. The mystic feels himself as a mediator of God and the world; he carries out the orders of the Godhead lowered into the soul. He has the mental image that God needs man; this mental image runs like a leitmotif through the whole mysticism of the Middle Ages. This is what constitutes the consecration of mysticism.\nEckhart compares the world to a building, and people to the building blocks. Man, as a building block, should not withdraw from the universe. The mystic feels united with the primordial divine life: this is the being enlightened, which in mysticism is called the self-knowledge of man. It shows that, just as the mathematician generates numbers, man can generate the highest from himself. Self-knowledge becomes immediate enthusiasm, because self-knowledge means devotion to the Godhead.\nIn John Tauler, this moodiness of the mystic comes out in his whole life: his life was an exposition of the divine life. He says, as long as I only discuss and present the highest divine wisdom, I have not achieved the right thing. I must disappear myself completely and let God speak from me. He says God looks at His own laws, through which He created the world, through me, my self is the self-life: I must let God experience Himself in me.\nEckhart's mysticism is a mystical knowledge; in Tauler we find mystical life. From the time on, a special artistic expression of the mystic is found: the one who experiences God in himself is called \"God-friend\".\nAn unknown personality appeared during Tauler's sermon; he is called the \"God-friend from the upper country\". He never meets us otherwise than that he appears, as it were, as a mirror of the other personalities who are influenced by him. Johannes Tauler states in his master book that he communicated knowledge of God to people, but he could not yet let life overflow; then the God-friend came and gave Johannes Tauler his enlightenment. The original source itself came alive in him. For a long time he gave up all preaching and withdrew with the unknown man from the upper country, in order to bring himself into the state of mind in which this spiritual life was rising, so that he made himself the channel of divine wisdom and it overflowed through him into others. His speech gained fire, he made the greatest impression; people were transformed by his words, through which people found the spark within them kindled. The dying to all that lives in the outside world, that is the revival of the new man: that is what Johannes Tauler could now bring about through the power of his word. Goethe says: \"For as long as you do not have this, this dying and becoming, you are only a dull guest on the dark earth.\" The experience of the conceptio immaculata is the dying and becoming, in the lower sense and in the higher sense. Those who listened to Tauler experienced the Unio mystica. Just as man feels all the external beauties that come from outside through sensation, so the mystic feels the beauty of the spiritual world through Christ, whom he experiences; it is an experience that makes him drunk: this is the true music of the spheres. Just as man feels the sensual harmony in the world of sensation, so the mystic feels in the soul the coherence of the great laws of the world, the action, the creation of the Logos, of God Himself, the music of the spheres. Through the human soul, the eternal God expresses himself in his Logos. Johannes Ruysbroek, the Belgian mystic, emphasizes this thought in a particularly intense way. The mystic understands in mysticism the lighting up of the divine source in his own soul. The mystic felt in himself, in self-knowledge, the divinity. Through this he found such flaming words for it."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-16",
+    "title": "Platonic Mysticism and Docta ignorantia I",
+    "date": "12 Nov 1904",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19041112c01.html",
+    "book_title": "Philosophy, History and Literature",
+    "content": "Today we come to a high point of medieval mysticism, to the mystic who was at the same time one of the most important scholars of his time: Nikolaus Chrypff or Krebs, of Kues on the Moselle, called the Kusan. He was one of the most interesting personalities of his time. He lived from 1401 to 1464. He was at the height of his time in the various sciences. He was a mathematician, physicist, jurist, first lawyer. He was also one of the leading, the tone-setting men of his time. He was extraordinarily ahead of his time. About a hundred years later, Nicolaus Copernicus put the worldview of astronomy on a new footing. But Nicolaus of Cusa had already clearly stated that the earth moves around the sun. Even more significant seems to be that the Cusan was not only a deep, leading thinker, but a clear thinker. He is a thinker who had absorbed scholasticism completely, That which is expressed by scholasticism is studied very little. The tremendous clarity and sharpness of conceptualization is the essential thing about it. Never has there been such a sharp guidance of the conceptual contours, never such a strict limitation of the concepts related to the spiritual life. Whoever wants to train himself in clear thinking, whoever works with firm, conceptual outlines, would have to immerse himself in one of the scholastic works. Cusanus underwent this training.\nHe also possessed everything related to the social knowledge of his time. He had a comprehensive circle of vision. In 1432, at the Council of Basel, he took an important position. Then he made long journeys through Germany and the Netherlands, dedicated especially to the reform of education. He emerged from the school of the \"Brothers of Common Life\". There, the focus was on a thorough formation of the mind and a clear education of the intellect. The Kusanian undertook his journey in the service of this school. Scientifically trained, clear and sharp thinking - he stands there freely, as a personality of impressive character. If he had wanted to, he could have achieved many things in the scientific field. As a preacher he knew how to grasp the listeners in the depth of their minds through his sermon. That which made his preaching so significant was the stream that emerged from medieval mysticism, the stream that we find in Eckhart, in Tauler and Suso, and in another guise in Giordano Bruno and Paracelsus.\nDeepness of mind, fire of soul, was paired in him with a quite transparent, sharp conceptual faculty. Everything that the mind can grasp, that reason can survey, gave the Cusanian only the substructure for what he had to say to the world. He was sent by the Pope to Constantinople to bring about a union between the Greek and Roman Churches. On his way home, he had an epiphany in which he felt that there was something else besides the knowledge of the intellect. From then on, he attributed the highest value only to that which is higher than knowledge. He wrote the work: \"De docta ignorantia\" out of this mood. The title: \"Of the learned ignorance\" should mean: something that goes beyond the mere sensory and intellectual knowledge, a seeing, a being enlightened. If one wants to understand this completely, one has to take some terms to help, which only the 19th century brought.\nThe 19th century has developed a peculiar physiology of the senses, for example in the famous Law of the Energies of the Senses by the physiologist Johannes Müller. He says that we can see a color, take in light, this stems from the fact that our eye is built in a certain way. If we did not have the eye, the world shining in light and colors would be lightless, without the perception of colors. The same can be said about the arrangement of our ear. It depends on the arrangement of our senses how the external world penetrates into us. It depends on the specific energies of our senses how we perceive the world. Helmholtz has spoken about how he thinks of the relationship. He says: How can I know how the light in itself, the sound in itself is formed? Only signs of the external world are our sensory perceptions.\nThe Kusanian calls \"knowledge\" also in this sense knowledge, namely as the impressions processed by the mind.\nWe now ask: Do not our senses have an intimate relation to what we see, hear, and so on? We have to imagine that the eye itself is built by light, that the senses are not only there for the outside world, but from the outside world. The eye has been formed by the light. Who are the ones who build our senses? If man were not limited within the limits of his ordinary consciousness, he would know this.\nIn the single individual must be the force which forms the senses. In embryonic life the light must be effective, the sound must be effective. They must work in embryonic life in the individual himself and form the organs. The light closes the eye from within, the sound the ear. We perceive the external qualities only through the senses. The senses have also formed these external qualities. They are the builders of our own organs. We ourselves are light from the world-light; we are sound from the world-sound.\nThe mystic lives himself into that which lives and weaves around him and in him. The creating light, which works outside and creates inside, he feels. He is himself shining and sounding in a shining and sounding world. When he lives in the creative light, lives in the creative sound, then he has mystical life. Then something comes over man that is different from the light from outside and the sound from outside. Whoever has experienced this once, feels it as truth. The Gnostics, the Egyptian mystics, the mystics of the Middle Ages speak of the creating light. They call it the aeon light. It is a light which from the mystic awakens the objects around him to living life. This is the pleroma of the Gnostics. Thus, the mystic feels blessed in the world light. He feels blissfully interwoven with this aeon light. There he is not separated from the essence of things; there he is partaker of the immediate creative power. This is what the mystic calls his bliss in the creative light. The Vedanta wisdom calls the world wisdom Chit, but the bliss where the mystic is immersed in the things, where the soul merges completely with the things, is called Anända. Chit is world wisdom, Anända is the wisdom that merges directly with the aeon light, that feels one with the all-light shining through the world. This mood the Kusanian calls \"docta ignorantia.\"\nJust as man can have the experience of merging with the Aeon Light into the Pleroma, so he can also merge with the cosmic world-thought. Then he feels the world thoughts resounding in his own inner being. When man becomes aware of the thought that brings the law to existence in things, and feels this swelling up in him as his own law, then the things resound in their own essence in his soul, that he becomes intimate with the things, as the friend becomes intimate with the friend. This perception of the whole world the Pythagoreans called harmony of the spheres. This is the resounding of the essence of things in man's own soul. There he feels united with the power of God. That is the hearing of the harmony of the spheres, of the creating universal law; that is being interwoven with the being of things, that is where the things themselves speak, and the things speak through the language of his soul out of himself. Then he has attained what the Cusanian says no words are capable of expressing.\nThe being is the seen. This does not express the sublime existence which comes as a predicate to things when the mystic unites himself in the deepest way with things. This sublime existence is the sat of the Indians.\nThe Pythagorean school distinguishes three stages: First, the external perception = Chitz second, the Pleroma = Anända; third, the harmony of the spheres = Sat.\nThe Pythagorean school distinguishes three stages. These are the three stages of cognition in the Cusanus: first, knowledge; second, super-knowledge or beatification; third, deification. Thus he calls them in the \"Docta ignorantia.\" That he knows these states gives his writings a mellowness, a softness, that one may say they are perfectly sweet with maturity. Moreover, his writings are wonderfully clear, transparent, full of tremendous ideas. He was a leading spirit. All who follow him then stand on the foundation he laid. So also Giordano Bruno. Cusanus drew his wisdom from the Pythagorean school. He understood what was meant by the Pleroma, the Aeon Light and the Harmony of the Spheres. - Ruysbroek and Suso are also the precursors of Cusanus in their refined and spiritually drunken way. The \"Theologia deutsch\" is like an overture to what the Cusanian wrote. A reprint of it has been procured by Franz Pfeiffer after a manuscript of 1497. Deep, cozy tones of a historically unknown personality are contained in this writing. If someone wants to understand the Sat of Vedanta philosophy, he must, as in Anända he must pour himself out into the world, in Sat he must pour out his will completely. In the deification (Sat) the selfless will must be there; his will must have become impersonal. - The one who wrote the \"Theologia deutsch\" made sure that his name did not come down to posterity. He calls himself only \"the Frankfurter\". Man must surrender his will to the Divine, as a messenger of the Godhead, and that which man wills of himself he calls Scripture, an offering. Before Cusanus, mysticism strove from mere knowledge into the introduction into the pleroma, the creating world-light. Then in the learned not-knowing this came out in a learned and perceptive way. Knowledge and understanding were awakened to immediate, new life. The Kusanian's not-knowing is at the same time a super-knowing. He distinguishes three stages: Knowledge, Beatification, Deification - Chit, Anânda, Sat. He is at the same time the greatest scholar and one of the deepest human beings.\nThese are the three stages of cognition in the Cusanus: first, knowledge; second, super-knowledge or beatification; third, deification. Thus he calls them in the \"Docta ignorantia.\"\nThat he knows these states gives his writings a mellowness, a softness, that one may say they are perfectly sweet with maturity. Moreover, his writings are wonderfully clear, transparent, full of tremendous ideas.\nHe was a leading spirit. All who follow him then stand on the foundation he laid. So also Giordano Bruno. Cusanus drew his wisdom from the Pythagorean school. He understood what was meant by the Pleroma, the Aeon Light and the Harmony of the Spheres. - Ruysbroek and Suso are also the precursors of Cusanus in their refined and spiritually drunken way.\nThe \"Theologia deutsch\" is like an overture to what the Cusanian wrote. A reprint of it has been procured by Franz Pfeiffer after a manuscript of 1497. Deep, cozy tones of a historically unknown personality are contained in this writing. If someone wants to understand the Sat of Vedanta philosophy, he must, as in Anända he must pour himself out into the world, in Sat he must pour out his will completely. In the deification (Sat) the selfless will must be there; his will must have become impersonal. - The one who wrote the \"Theologia deutsch\" made sure that his name did not come down to posterity. He calls himself only \"the Frankfurter\". Man must surrender his will to the Divine, as a messenger of the Godhead, and that which man wills of himself he calls Scripture, an offering.\nBefore Cusanus, mysticism strove from mere knowledge into the introduction into the pleroma, the creating world-light. Then in the learned not-knowing this came out in a learned and perceptive way. Knowledge and understanding were awakened to immediate, new life.\nThe Kusanian's not-knowing is at the same time a super-knowing. He distinguishes three stages: Knowledge, Beatification, Deification - Chit, Anânda, Sat. He is at the same time the greatest scholar and one of the deepest human beings."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-17",
+    "title": "Schiller's Life and Character",
+    "date": "21 Jan 1905",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050121p01.html",
+    "book_title": "Schiller and Our Times",
+    "content": "It will be a hundred years on 9th May, 1905, since Schiller died, and the educated world in Germany will certainly celebrate the memory of this event. Three generations lie between Schiller and us; and so our first task would appear to be to survey the meaning of Schiller to us today. The last great Schiller festival took place in 1859, but with quite a different significance from what ours can have today. Times have changed enormously. The pictures, problems and thoughts which occupy our contemporaries are quite different. The celebration held in 1859 was something which penetrated deep into the heart of the German people.\nIn 1859 there were still men who themselves lived wholly in the ideas which had been brought out by Schiller's poetic power. It may be that this year we shall see more exuberant festivities; but no such participation from the depths of the soul is any longer possible.\nThe question therefore forces itself on us, what has happened since then? and how can Schiller still mean anything to us? The grand pictures (and ideas) of the Goethe-Schiller period have vanished. In 1859 these ideas were still incorporated in individuals with whom the older among us became acquainted when we were young. These leading spirits, who were rooted completely in the traditions of the time, are now with the dead. The youngest among us have no longer any knowledge of them.\nIn the person of my teacher Schröer, who put the Goethe period before us in enthusiastic fashion, I had been privileged to know a man who was rooted wholly in that period. In Herman Grimm the last example died of those whose souls were completely at one with that period. today, all that is past history. Other problems concern us. Political and social questions have become so pressing that we no longer understand that intimate artistic attitude.\nMen of that period would have a strange effect on us; we have lost their deep, “soulful” attitude to art. That is no reproach; our times have become hard. Let us take three leading thinkers of the present and see how differently they talk of the movements of their time.\nFirst, Ibsen: we see how he deals comprehensively with the problems of our modern culture, how he has found the most penetrating melody to suit the modern heart and a civilisation which is passing into chaos. Then, Zola: What is to be the relation at the present between our art and a life which is threatening to explode in social struggles — that is the question he thrusts upon us. That life appears to us rigid and impenetrable, decided by quite other forces than our fantasy and soul. Lastly, Tolstoi, who started from art, and only later became a preacher and social reformer. today such a purely aesthetic culture as Schröer depicted to us for the Goethe-Schiller period seems quite impossible.\nAt that period the decisive problem of life was what we might call the aesthetic conscience. Beauty, taste and artistic sensitivity were regarded as problems quite as serious and pressing as politics and freedom are today. Art was regarded as something which must have its part in the machinery of culture. But today, Tolstoi, who has created masterpieces in the sphere of art, deserts his art and looks for other means of speaking to the sensibility of his contemporaries.\nSchiller therefore is not to be judged in our times as he was in the Eighteenth Century. But what has remained, is the impressive depths of his “Weltanschauung” (worldview). Quantities of questions receive a wholly new light as a result of Schiller's view of the world. Our business in these lectures is to try to look at them from this standpoint.\nIn dealing with the various problems of our times and our culture, in science as in artistic effort, there is nowadays great confusion and obscurity. Every youthful author thinks it his business to establish a new philosophy; literature is choked with books on questions which have been long ago solved. Questions are unfolded which, in the form we see, reach no conclusion because those who are trying to solve them have not really occupied themselves with the problems. Often indeed, the questions are not even asked properly, so that the problem really lies in the way in which the questions are put.\nThere are two currents out of which we can see the personality of Schiller growing up: — on the one side the growth of materialism, on the other the longing for the assertion of the personality. What we call “Illumination” Aufklärung has its roots in these two currents.\nAge-old traditions were tottering during the Eighteenth Century. In the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries the deepest questions of the human spirit were solved on the basis of tradition; and no shocks were dealt to man's fundamental relationship with the world and its deepest foundations.\nNow came a difference; it was impossible to solve the basic problems dealing with the human life of the spirit in the same sense as had been done for centuries. In France, stimulated by English “Sensationalism,” a rationalistic, materialistic philosophy was growing up. The soul was beginning to be deduced from material conditions; everything was to be explained out of the physical. The Encyclopaedists made spirit originate in matter. The ups and downs in the world around us were a whirl of atomic movement. “Man is a machine” — that was more or less the form in which La Mettrie formulated his materialistic creed. Goethe already complained, when he grew acquainted with the writings of these French materialists (Holbach's Système de la Nature), and was indignant at men's presumption in trying to explain the whole world by a few barren ideas.\nBy the side of this was a second stream which derived from Rousseau. Rousseau's writings made an enormous impression on the most important men of the time. There is a story about Kant, who was a great pedant, and took his daily walk so punctually that the inhabitants of Königsberg could set their clocks by him. But there was one occasion when to the astonishment of the inhabitants the philosopher did not appear for some days: he had been reading Rousseau, whose writings had gripped him so hard that he had forgotten his daily walk.\nThe foundations of a whole civilisation had been shaken by Rousseau. He put the question whether mankind had risen as a consequence of civilisation; and his answer was a negative. In his view men were happier at a stage of nature than at their present stage when they allowed their personality to decay in itself.\nIn times when men, basing themselves on tradition, still believed they knew something of the relationships of the world, they were not so intent on the personality. Now, when the personality had cut asunder the bonds between itself and the world, men began to ask how that personality was to establish itself firmly in the world.\nThey believed that it was impossible to know anything about the deepest foundations of the world and the soul. But if, as a result, there was nothing any longer secure in the world, the longing towards better material conditions was bound to increase in everyone. The revolutionary efforts of the Eighteenth Century had their origin here; connected with the materialistic current. A good Christian of the Seventeenth Century could not have spoken thus of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. This striving after liberty (freedom) must be regarded as the fundamental current of the time.\nSchiller was young when these ideas of freedom were ripening. Rousseau's ideas had, as we have just said, a colossal influence on the most important men in Germany, like Kant, Herder and Wieland. The young Schiller was also fascinated; and we find him, even at the Karlsschule, engaged in reading Rousseau, Voltaire, etc.\nThe age had reached a dead end. The upper classes had lost all moral soundness. An external tyranny dominated in school as well. In Schiller there was a peculiar depth of temperament which appeared, even in boyhood, as a tendency towards religion. For that reason he had, moreover, originally intended to study theology; his whole disposition urged him to the deepest problems of existence. The peculiar form taken in Germany by this striving for freedom was in the union of piety with an infinite longing for emancipation. The urge towards the freedom of personality, and not merely religion, is also the atmosphere of Klopstock's Messiah : it is in his religious feeling that the German wants to be free. The Messiah made a great impression on Schiller.\nSchiller chose the faculty of medicine; and the way in which he tackled the subject, is related to the questions which were particularly occupying him. He tried to reach some conclusion on these questions by a serious study of nature. The teaching in the Karlsschule was to have a deeply comprehensive and all-round effect on him. The weaknesses to be seen in modern secondary education did not exist in that school. The natural sciences were studied thoroughly; and the centre of study was philosophy. Deepest questions of metaphysics and logic were discussed.\nThus Schiller entered on his medical studies with a philosophic spirit. The way in which he took them is important and significant for his life. We cannot understand Schiller wholly if we do not read the two dissertations which he wrote after finishing his studies. They deal with the questions:\nWhat is the relation between spirit and matter?\nWhat are the relations of the animal and spiritual natures in man?\nOf the first only little survives. In the second Schiller puts to himself the question how we have to understand the working of the material in the human body.\nFor Schiller, even the material body has something spiritual. There are men who see in the body only something low and animal. There is no depth of content in a view which thus lowers and abominates the body; nor was it the view of the young Schiller. For Schiller the body is the temple of the spirit, built by wisdom, and not to no purpose possessing influence on the spirit.\nWhat is the significance of the body for the soul? that is the question which Schiller, who felt the physical also to be holy, sought to solve. He describes, for example, how the quality of soul expresses itself in gesture and in feeling. He seeks to explain to himself, in fine and illuminating fashion, what remains permanently of the movement of soul thus expressed. He says at the close of his dissertation: —\nMatter breaks up again, at death, into its ultimate elements, which henceforward wander through the kingdoms of nature in other forms and relationships, to serve other purposes. The soul departs, to exercise its power of thought in other spheres and to observe the universe from other sides. We may say, of course, that it has by no means exhausted the possibilities of this sphere, that it might have left this sphere more perfect; but do we know that this sphere is lost to it? We lay aside many a book which we do not understand, but which we may perhaps understand better some years hence.\nThis is how Schiller tries to make clear to himself the eternal of the spirit in its relation to physical nature — without however under-estimating the physical. That remained the central problem for all Schiller's life: How is man born from out the physical and how does his soul and the freedom of his personality stand towards the world? How is the soul to find its centre now that the old traditions have gone?\nAfter having in the dramas of his youth thundered forth all his passion for emancipation, and won over the heart of his people, he busied himself with history and philosophy, and we touch the deepest problems of the history of civilisation or cultural history when we study the dramas of Schiller. Everyone had a piece of Marquis Posa in himself, and so Schiller's problem took on a new feature. The deepest questions in relation to the human soul and the meaning of life were discussed. He saw how little had been achievable on the external plane. In Germany the effort was being made to solve the problem of freedom in an artistic way; and that resulted in what we may call the “aesthetic conscience.” Schiller, too, had put the question to himself in this way; and he was sure that the artist could give man of the highest. He dealt with this problem in later years. In his “Letters on the aesthetic Education of Man” he says: Man acts unfreely in the external world from necessity; in the world of reason he is subject to necessity, to logic. Man is thus hedged in by the real world and by his ideal of reason. But there is another, middle condition between reason and the sense world, the aesthetic. Anyone who has artistic sensibility, appreciates the spirit in the sensible; he sees spirit enwoven in nature. Nature is to him a beauty-filled picture of the spiritual. The sense world is therefore only the expression of the spirit; in a work of art the sensible is ennobled by the spirit. The spirit is removed from the kingdom of necessity. In beauty man Eves as in freedom. Art is thus the intermediary between the senses and reason in the realm of freedom.\nGoethe felt the same in presence of the works of art in Italy. In the beautiful the impulse of mankind towards freedom finds its satisfaction; here he is raised above iron necessity. Not by force or state-laws. In aesthetic enjoyment Schiller saw an education into harmony. As man, he feels himself free through art; and so he would like to transform the whole world into a work of art.\nHere we see the difference between that time and our own. today, art is kept in a corner; then, Schiller wanted to give life an immediate impression through art. today Tolstoi has to condemn art, while Ibsen, in his art, becomes the critic of social life. At that time Schiller wanted to interfere direct on life by means of art. When he wrote his pamphlet on “The Stage as a moral Institution,” during the period when he was acting as reporter at the Mannheim theatre, he did it because he wanted to give a direct impulse to civilisation by means of art."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-18",
+    "title": "Schiller's Work and its Changing Transformations",
+    "date": "28 Jan 1905",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050128p01.html",
+    "book_title": "Schiller and Our Times",
+    "content": "We have seen how Schiller grew up out of the ideas of the Eighteenth Century and how the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment had taken root in his soul. They had already assumed their peculiar form when he left the Karlsschule and wrote the above-mentioned theses.\nIf we want to describe these ideas in a word, we may say that the main problem was the emancipation of personality. This liberation from age-old tradition goes still further. When medieval man before the age of “Illumination” thought about his relation to himself, to nature, the universe and God, he found himself ready established within the universe. He worshipped the same God without, who dwelt within his own soul; the same forces which were active in the world without, were active in man's own soul; there was a certain unity to be seen in the laws of the universe and in the nature of man. We need only think of men like Giordano Bruno: This monistic conviction of the relationship of nature to man can be found in his writings.\nThere was thus no gulf between what we may call the moral claim and the objective laws in nature. This opposition only arose later when man excluded nature from divine influence. The attitude which has grown up in materialism, knew no relation between nature and moral feeling or what man develops within himself as a moral claim.\nThis was the origin of Rousseau-ism, which is fundamentally a revolutionary feeling, a protest against the whole line of development hitherto. It teaches that when we observe man's demand for freedom and his assertion of morality, a harsh discord appears. It asks whether there really can be such a difference between the objective world and human nature, that men must long to get out of it, to escape from the whole of their civilisation.\nThese spiritual struggles found expression in the temperament of the young Schiller; and in the three dramas of his youth this longing receives a new form. In the “Räuber,” in “Fiesco” and “Kabale und Liebe” we see depicted concretely, with a vast pathos, the demand that man must do something to produce this harmony. In the figure of Karl Moor, we see the creation of a man who bears in himself the opposition between the objective order and the demand made by his humanity, and feels called upon to produce some harmony between nature and himself. His tragedy arises because he believes that he can restore the law by lawlessness and arbitrariness. In “Fiesco” the longing for freedom crashes on the rock of ambition. The ideal of freedom fails through this disharmony in the soul of the ambitious Fiesco, who cannot find his way so far as to put order into the moral ideal. In “Kabale und Liebe” the demand of human nature in the uprising middle-classes stands opposed to the demands of the world as they were expressed in the ruling classes. The relation between moral ideals and general ideas applicable to the world had been lost. The discord echoes grandly, for all their youthful immaturity, from the first dramas of Schiller.\nSuch natures as Schiller's find themselves less easily than the one-line, simpler and. unsophisticated type, just as we see in natural evolution that lower creatures require shorter periods of preparation than the more highly developed animals. Great natures have to pass through the most varied phases, because their inmost qualities have to be fetched up from the deepest levels. Anyone who has much in him and comes into the world with a claim to genius, will have a hard path, and will have to work through many earlier stages — as the analogy of the embryonic development of higher animals shows us.\nWhat Schiller lacked was knowledge of man and of the world. His first plays show him with all the defects which arise from that fact, but with all the merits which hardly appear again later so clearly. This judgment is made from a fairly high level; we have to realise what we owe to Schiller's greatness. But things could not remain thus for long. Schiller had to rise beyond this limited horizon; and we see how in his fourth play, Don Carlos, he works his way to another standpoint. We may look from a double angle, first from that of Don Carlos, second that of Marquis Posa. Schiller himself tells us how his interest at first lay with the youthful fiery Carlos and then passed to the cosmopolitan Posa. That indicates a deep change in his own personality.\nSchiller had been summoned by his friend Körner to Dresden, so that he might work there in peace. There he grew acquainted with a philosophy and view of the world which was to have a great influence on his own personality. Kantianism was a necessary study for a person like Schiller, and we shall understand his standpoint yet more deeply if we delay a moment over what was then working upon him.\nAt that time, we can see two quite definite currents in German intellectual life. The one is that which finds most definite expression in Herder's Ideas for the history of the philosophy of mankind ; the other the Kantian philosophy. In Herder we have the passion to put man into relation with the whole of nature and to understand him in that relation. It is this striving for unity which makes Herder appear so modern a man. ... Arguments brought now-a-days against Kantianism with its dualism (which is still regarded as only an academic philosophy), exist already in Herder's Metacritic. The whole embraces a mass of great ideas; there is a striving after the unification of nature and man. From the lowest product of nature right up to the thought of man there is one law. What is seen in man as the moral law, is in the crystal the law of its form. One fundamental evolution runs through all that is, so that that which forms the flower in the plant, develops in man into humanity. It is the world-picture which appeared in Goethe also and which he expressed in Faust in the words:\nHow all weaves itself to a whole; one thing works and lives in the other,\nand which he describes in his Hymn to Nature.\nGoethe is wholly permeated by this striving for unity, as it found expression in Giordano Bruno, the Pythagorean. He stands completely within the stream:\nWhat were a God who only touches from without, And lets the All run past in cycles? His task it were to move the world within, To foster nature in himself, himself in nature.\nThat is the monistic stream, to which Schiller at that period still was a stranger. For him there was still a two-ness, a dualism.\nIn his Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason Kant had set a definite limit to human knowledge. Man's capacity for knowledge extends as far as reason goes. It can only give him the external, and cannot pierce to the real being of things. That which is the thing-in-itself, is hidden behind the appearance; man cannot even speak of it. But there is something within man which cannot be mere appearance. That is the moral law. On the one side — the world of appearance; on the other — the moral law, the categorical imperative, the “Thou shalt,” which may not be doubted, which rises above knowledge and cannot be taken as appearance. Thus in Kant's philosophy we have not merely a duality such as we saw before, but the whole world of human spiritual life is divided into two halves. That which is to be superior to all criticism, the moral law, is not knowledge at all, but a practical belief, which contains no limits of knowledge but only moral postulates. Thus Kantianism appears as the .most abrupt exposition of dualism.\nBefore Kant there was a science of external appearance, and then a science of reason which could penetrate by innate activity to God, soul and immortality: that is the form of the Wolffian philosophy. Kant, who had studied the English Sensationalists, Hume and Locke, was at this juncture led to have doubts: how shall we get anywhere if we have always to test the highest ideas of God, Freedom and Immortality by their reasonableness. He says in his introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason “ I had to destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Because we must believe, and in order that we may believe, he thrust down knowledge from her throne. He wanted to start from foundations which left no room for doubt. Knowledge cannot ever reach to these things, but the “Thou shalt” speaks so decisively that the harmony which man is unable to discover, must be accomplished by God. And so we have to postulate a God. As physical beings we are enclosed in barriers, but as moral beings we must be free. This gives an unbridgeable dualism; there is no balance between man and nature.\nSchiller, who in accordance with his temperament still held to the opposition between nature and man, pictures in Don Carlos the growth of man beyond nature to his ideals. He never puts the question of what is possible, but only the question of the “Thou shalt.” In Don Carlos it is not a criticism of court-life that we have: That passes into the background behind the practical moral postulates. “Man, be such that the laws of your action could become the universal laws of humanity.” That was Kant's demand; and in Marquis Posa, the cosmopolitan idealist, Schiller sets up a claim for the independence of the ideal from all that comes from nature.\nWhen he finished Don Carlos, Schiller stood in the completest possible opposition to the view of Goethe and Herder, and therefore at the beginning of his life at Weimar no contact with them was possible. But Schiller became the Reformer of Kantianism: he strove for a monistic view, but could find the unity only in the aesthetic sphere, in the problem of beauty. He shows us how man only lives fully when he both ennobles nature up to his own level and draws morality from above into his nature. The categorical imperative does not subdue him to its sway, but he serves willingly what is contained in the “Thou shalt.” Thus Schiller reaches the heights and rises above Kant. He opposes Kant who makes of man not a free being but a slave, bowed beneath the yoke of duty. He saw clearly that there is something in man quite different from this bowing beneath the yoke of the “Thou shalt.” In monumental phrases we find expressed his approximation to the essential of Goethe's and Herder's attitude: “Gladly serve I my friends, yet alas I do it with pleasure; thus it irks me to find that there's no virtue in me.”\nKant had degraded what man does willingly from his own inclination, and set on a higher level what he did from a sense of duty. Kant apostrophises passionately the stern duty which has nothing attractive in her. Schiller raises man from his own weakness, when he makes the moral law a law of his own nature. Through the study of history, through honest inclination and devotion to human life he reached the harmony that had been lost and thus to an understanding of Goethe. Schiller describes in splendid words in the memorable letter of 23rd August 1794, what was Goethe's way:\n“I have for a long time, 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 hardest 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.”\nHere Schiller had reached the height to which he had to evolve. Though he had started from a dualism, he had now reached the unity of man and nature.\nThus he attained to that form of creation which was peculiarly his in the latest period, from the middle of the nineties onward, and to friendship with Goethe. It was a historical friendship because it did not look only for the happiness of their two selves but was fruitful for the world and for humanity.\nIn this friendship of Goethe and Schiller we have not merely Goethe, and Schiller, but a third something: Goethe plus Schiller. Anyone who follows the course of the spiritual life, will discern in it one being, which could only exist, because in their selfless friendship and mutual devotion something developed which stood as a new being above the single personality. This mood will give us the proper transition to Goethe and to all that he meant to Schiller."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-19",
+    "title": "Schiller and Goethe",
+    "date": "4 Feb 1905",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050204p01.html",
+    "book_title": "Schiller and Our Times",
+    "content": "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.\nThey 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.\nIf 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.\nIn 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.\nThe Iphigenie too was beyond Schiller's comprehension.\nAt 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.\nEven 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.\nFrom 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.\nIt 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.\nSchiller'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.\n“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.”\nIn 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.\nIn 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.\nThe 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.\nThere 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.”\nThey 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."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-20",
+    "title": "Schiller's Worldview and His 'Wallenstein'",
+    "date": "11 Feb 1905",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050211p01.html",
+    "book_title": "Schiller and Our Times",
+    "content": "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.\nWhen 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.”\nWe 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.\nWe 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.\nAs 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?\nFrom 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.\nKant 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.\nThere 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.\nWallenstein 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.\nBut 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.\nYet 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.\nThere can be no order in nature which opposes the laws of the human spirit.\nIf 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.\nThe 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.\nHe 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."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-21",
+    "title": "Schiller, the Greek Drama and Nietzsche",
+    "date": "18 Feb 1905",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050218p01.html",
+    "book_title": "Schiller and Our Times",
+    "content": "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.\nIn 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.\nSchiller, 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.\nThis 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.\nSchiller'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.\nThe 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.\nThere 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.\nWe 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: —\nWallenstein (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.\nBut 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.\nThe 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.\nWhat 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.\nFor 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.\nSchiller 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.\nIn 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."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-22",
+    "title": "Schiller's Later Plays",
+    "date": "25 Feb 1905",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050225p01.html",
+    "book_title": "Schiller and Our Times",
+    "content": "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.\nIn 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.\nThis 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.\nWe 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.\nSchiller 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.\nIn 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.\nIn 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.\nHe 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:\n“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.\nSchiller 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.\nNow 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.\nIf 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.\nThe 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.\nHere 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:\n“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.”\nThat 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 :\nUnd hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheme Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.\nBehind him lay in unessential feint What holds us all in bondage, the common trivial.\nThis 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.\nThis 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:\n“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.”"
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-23",
+    "title": "Schiller's Influence During the 19th Century",
+    "date": "4 Mar 1905",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050304p01.html",
+    "book_title": "Schiller and Our Times",
+    "content": "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.\nIf 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.\nHis 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.\nBut 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:\nWeit hinter ihm im wesenlosen Scheine Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.\nSchiller'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:\nWhat name the future's lips shall give to him Is still unknown, this generation recognised him His name was August Wilhelm Schlegel.\nNor 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.\nBut 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.\nAll 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.\nIf we follow out the development of style in these opposing romantics, we find the influence of Schiller even in the words he had coined.\nIt 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.\nNevertheless, 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.\nThe 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:\nDo 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.\nThis 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.\nThe 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.\nSchiller's attitude to art is something which had decisive influence on his relation to the Nineteenth Century."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-24",
+    "title": "What Can the Present Learn from Schiller?",
+    "date": "5 Mar 1905",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050305p01.html",
+    "book_title": "Schiller and Our Times",
+    "content": "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.\nFor 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.\nA 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.\nA 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.\nThe 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.\nWhat 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.\nAfter 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.\nThis 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.\nThere 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.\nMaterialism 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.\nSchiller 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.\nBut 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.\nNowadays 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.\nIf 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."
+  },
+  {
+    "id": "GA051-25",
+    "title": "Schiller and Idealism (Aesthetics and Morality)",
+    "date": "25 Mar 1905",
+    "city": "Berlin",
+    "source": "https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050325p01.html",
+    "book_title": "Schiller and Our Times",
+    "content": "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.\nWe 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 Ae sthetica 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.\nWe 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.\nWhat 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.\nIn 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.\nSchiller 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.\nHe 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.\n“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.\nThus 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.\nGoethe 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.\nIn 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 .\nA 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.\nThat 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\nUnd hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheme Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.\nwhich 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.\nHe 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:\nNur der verdient die Freiheit und das lieben Der Täglich sie erobern muss.\nOnly he deserves freedom and life Who daily must conquer them anew.\nIn this way Schiller fought his way upward, till he became the master of an etheric spirit-permeated form."
+  }
+]
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