[Image: Title graphic - Journal for ]

ESSENTIAL ANTHROPOSOPHY Alan Howard WATER, ELEMENT OF THE THRESHOLD IN MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS OLD AGE AND RETIREMENT Erwin Phillips SOLOVIEV AND THE TASK OF RUSSIA ChristyBarnes OUR DOCTOR, A NARRATION Gerhard Klein THE LABIATAE, PLANTS OF WARMTH

Also reviews by George Russell and Amos Franceschelli; poems and prose by , Alma Graham Jenks and Andrey Belyi. NUMBER 18 AUTUMN, 1973 All cultural life and all spiritual human endeavor consists in a work which has as its aim self-mastery by the ego. Every human being living in the present age is engaged in this work whether he wishes it or not, whether he is conscious of it or not.

Rudolf Steiner Essential Anthroposophy

ALAN HOWARD

A word like ‘essential’ can only have meaning in reference to its opposite, ‘unessential.’ Therefore, it may well be asked how anybody dare give the impression that anything in Anthropo­ sophy could be unessential. And, of course, no one really would; that is, no one who recognises Anthroposophy for what it is as a comprehensive body of spiritual knowledge. None the less, there is a context in which this phrase, ‘essential Anthroposophy,’ may not only have justification, but even be a guide to those who are obliged by the circumstances of life to decide just how much they can and cannot manage. Such a decision is not the same for all people. There is a vast difference in people’s life conditions. Living in retirement in Dornach, for instance, or in one of those communities where everything is ‘done’ anthroposophically, is a very different matter from being immersed in the commercial or industrial life of a large city, or having just embarked on a career, and perhaps be building a home and starting a family at the same time. So when one looks at all that Anthroposophy has to offer — all the books of ’s that are there to be read, together with the hundreds of lectures that are available, plus the importance of doing , painting, modelling, speech, not to mention caring for a bio-dynamic garden and attending group meetings and lectures — one may well regard some consideration of ‘essential’ as neither disparaging nor inappropri­ ate.

Italics throughout are the author’s own.

1 If Rudolf Steiner himself could say, in the chapter on the Path of Knowledge in Theosophy, It must be enough for us at first to direct our minds to the permanent. If we do this, the knowledge of the permanent will thereby awaken in us. We must wait until it is given. And it is given at the right time to each one who waits with patience — and works,” it is obvious that the ‘essence’ of Anthroposophy is not a quantitative term. Perhaps the ‘essential’ is already indicated by those last two words in the quotation above, ‘— and works;’ so let us start with the sine qua non: Study and Meditation. And having said that, the problem of essentials only raises its head in another place. What is really meant by study and meditation? What should one study or meditate upon? How much should one do? Study has very much in common with meditation, in so far as it implies the strenuous application of thought to a chosen theme; living with a thought until it becomes part of oneself. It certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with knowing ‘a lot of’ Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner himself makes this clear in the preface to Theosophy: “One cannot read this book as one is accustomed ordinarily to read books at the present day. In certain respects every page, and even many a sentence will have to be worked out by the reader ... For only in this way can the book become to the reader what it ought to become. He who merely reads it through will not have read it at all. Its truths must be experienced, lived.” Or again, take what he says, in his Hamburg lectures on St. John, about The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: “A person can go very far in this matter of catharsis if, for example, he has gone through and inwardly experienced all that is in my book Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and feels that this book was for him a stimulation, and that now he has reached the point where he can himself actually reproduce the thoughts just as they are there presented. If a person holds the same relationship to this book that a virtuoso, in playing a selection on the piano, holds to the composer of the piece, that, he reproduces the whole within himself . . .”

2 How many of us can put our hands on our hearts and say we have worked at any one book to this extent? This does not mean of course that one should ignore others; but when it is a question of discovering what is essential, here at least is a pretty clear indication of how to set about it. Anthroposophical literature in its entirety could be compared to a kind of wall, or even to a range of mountains, guarding from the frivolous and the dilettantes — and yet admitting the earnest and open-minded to — the reality of spiritual experience which lies within it. The literature is not that reality itself, but only a means of coming to it. One may attempt it at almost any point; but one must first determine on that point; otherwise one could wander round it for ever, sampling it here and there, and never getting a step nearer to what is within. But once having found one’s point, it is possible, as Steiner himself says, to get very far. It depends on how willing one is to do so. Such a point of entry will be different for different people. For one it may be Theosophy, for another the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, while for a third it may be Knowledge of the Higher Worlds or something else. I once knew a man who just spent months and months with a particular lecture — and needless to say he was never quite the same man after it. The essential is to find that point of entry, and not to be sidetracked from it until some result has begun to show. That is study, and something which everyone can do. As to meditation: here, too, if one should take into account all that Rudolf Steiner has said about it, and all the things he has said one could — even, sometimes, should — meditate upon, and all the published meditations from his own hand that there are to choose from, one might never get to meditating on anything at all — except what to meditate on! In the ‘classic’ on this subject, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Rudolf Steiner begins almost at once with the necessity of the daily practice of ‘inner tranquility;’ that is, putting everything else out of the mind for a while, and remaining quite still within oneself, ‘listening.’ That could seem a comparatively elementary thing to do; and in relation to all

3 the other things that are described in that book, it may very well be. But at the end of the first part of that book he has a chapter on ‘Conditions,’ which he says everyone must attempt who wishes to make use of what else is given there. He particularly says ‘attempt,’ not ‘fulfil’ those conditions; for the conditions are such that nobody is likely to be able to fulfil them this side of the Jupiter evolution. But they must be attempted. Those conditions are: Maintaining health of body and balance of mind; feeling oneself as a link in the whole of life; recognizing that thoughts and feelings are as real as deeds; realizing that the real being of man is in his inner not his outer self; feeling gratitude to the cosmos for the gift of life; steadfastness in carrying out a resolution; and finally, living one's life in accordance with these conditions. That alone is surely enough for a spiritual giant! But note what goes with it: By attempting these conditions a man, “will prepare himself for the inner tranquility he must attain.” In other words, inner tranquility is not simply a preparatory exercise for more advanced work. It is itself a basic essential attainment; and one must prepare oneself for that, by attempting these seven conditions. Again, how many of us can say that we have achieved a regular, on-going experience of inner tranquility on these terms? There is something else, however, about meditation which has already been touched upon in its likeness to study. That is the building up of a particular thought and concentrating on it. But what thought? For the wealth of thoughts one has to choose from is overwhelming. How does one choose? Can one say of any one of the many thoughts that Rudolf Steiner has given that this one is preferable to that? One may, if one is willing to pay attention to that inner guide who quite often ‘speaks’ to one out of one’s study. How often has it happened that while you are reading something of Anthroposophy you have suddenly stopped, perhaps in mid sentence, as a certain thought has, as it were, ‘jumped out of the page’ at you; and you become so excited that you sit there

4 exclaiming inwardly — perhaps even aloud, a “That’s just the thing I’ve been looking for all my life. It must have been at the back of my mind all the time, only I’ve never been able to find words for it.” That, if ever a thought was, is surely your thought; even though it is at the same time the common property of thousands of others who care to read it. What makes a thought ‘ours’ is the manner, the time and place even, in which such a thought bursts on us in the light and warmth of living reality not felt before. We do not choose such thoughts; we do not select them by any process of intellectual reasoning. They are given; and, if one cared to go into it, they are given because the spiritual world knows we have need of that thought at just that time. What, then, could be more appropriate for meditation? Indeed, one must meditate upon such gifts, if one is not to let them “fade into the light of common day;” and thereby harden one’s inner ear to what further gifts the spirit may have in store for us. One must bring them again and again into consciousness; regularly and intensely, re-creating as far as possible that same warmth and light with which it was first experienced. That is meditation; — not all that there is to it by any means; but essential enough to provide a living awareness of the spirit, which is, after all, what all meditation aspires to. But how long should one do this? “If one has no more than five minutes a day, that five minutes is enough.” Those words are Rudolf Steiner’s, not mine. He was well aware of the difficulties of ‘doing Anthroposophy’ in our time; but he also emphasized that it is not the length of time that is important, but how that time is used. At first even the kind of thought is not important. If one takes a look at that little book, Practical Training in Thought, one will find that one can meditate on nothing more ‘esoteric’ than a pin or a pencil. Indeed, regular work of this kind, he adds, will help us more to an understanding of the Saturn and Sun evolutions of the earth than any mystical musing might do — or, ‘flapping about in the

5 Ewigkeit’ as an anthroposophical friend of mine once described it. The essential, however, is regularity. It is the will in meditation, not the thought as such, that gets to work on the inner being; and the unavoidable restriction of one’s meditation to a few minutes a day, because of outer circumstances, can even be an advantage. One is less likely to attempt assignments beyond one’s power of continuing. Another essential is — thinking the basic thoughts of Anthroposophy. By this is meant those thoughts which should be repeatedly brought to mind whether in a meditative or any other way, until they become the permanent background of consciousness. There are many thoughts in Anthroposophy of such a far-reaching nature, that one hesitates to think too much about them at all. They are beyond our intellectual, logical thinking. They are more a feeling-in-thought than thought itself. They are intimations of what thought may yet attain to. But there are also those which not only can, but should be thought again and again. The reason for this is twofold. First, it is so fatally easy for a thought, even an anthroposophical thought, to remain just a thought. That is, we know it, we understand it, we can recall it at a moment’s notice, but it has become like something which we have jotted down in a notebook, and carry about with us because we might want to refer to it later on. But a thought is a living force which can only exert its power if it is constantly made to do so in a fully receptive consciousness. Otherwise it is like unkindled fuel in the hearth of the soul, unable to give either light or warmth. The second reason is perhaps even more important than the first. We live with all mankind in a thought atmosphere which is the product of the thinking activity of each one of us. It is as real as the air we breathe and as polluting, too! We have therefore a responsibility to do something about clearing away the materialistic thought-smog which is suffocating us all. That can only be done by repeatedly permeating it with the thoughts of the spirit. If one neglects to do so it can only be because one 6 has not yet grasped the basic fact on which all of Anthroposophy rests: the spiritual reality of thought and its power to change the world. First among such thoughts, therefore, one must put that of the essential nature of man as a spiritual being. We must grasp the clear distinction between that which may be included in the ‘personality,’ the kind of person one is, the temporary part of us which was born and will die; and that which indwells the personality, its inner essence, the point as Steiner calls it of the I or Ego, which was not born and will not die, which passes from incarnation to incarnation, which evolves. One must live in such a thought again and again, until it is not just a thought but the intuitive experience of the being of one’s thinking self. Otherwise one has no point of departure for the rest of spiritual discovery; for this is the spiritual experience compatible with our ordinary consciousness; and higher consciousness itself can only become possible on this founda­ tion. How can one otherwise hope to tread the path from ‘the spiritual in man to the spiritual in the universe,’ if one has not first found where that path begins in man, in oneself? The gods have already seen to it that we have trodden that path downward, from the spiritual in the universe. Now we have to tread it upward, from the spiritual in ourselves. This thought is also important for our time when everything is being done to rob man of the consciousness of his spiritual being. He is just a higher animal, we are told, or a behavioural complex for heredity and the environment to mould as they will. Which is so, of course, up to a point. That is the subtle danger of these ideas. They are half, if not three quarters, true; and therefore not easy to combat. The evidence supporting them cannot be denied. How very much each one of us is the result of circumstance, heredity, education and other influences. Even Rudolf Steiner himself reminds us of this in those ‘Conditions’ referred to above; and though the well-read anthroposophist may easily explain all this on the grounds of destiny, destiny has not very much meaning for ourselves or others, unless a firm foundation for the being who bears that destiny has first been

7 established. Everything depends on being able to live continually in the thought of man’s spiritual reality. Another thought with which that of destiny is intimately connected, is the re-embodiment of the spiritual being of man in repeated earth lives. Unless, however, the thought of the living spirit of man is so strong in us that its re-embodiment in successive earth-lives is seen as the only way self-conscious man can live on earth, the fact of death will still make materialists of us all. Death is so complete and final in its apparent manifestation, that it can still shake the most vigorous spiritual convictions. We stand before a lifeless form whose every gesture so recently meant joy and fellowship to us, and we can see nothing but mineral substance. Granted comforting and inspiring thoughts may rally to our assistance, which can work powerfully on our feelings, but the fact with which our senses presents us as powerfully counterworks them. What was once so intimately part of our world is no longer there. “Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still,” is a very real desire. One cannot wait for higher cognition to ‘prove’ the indestructibility of the human spirit, one has to see it in the unequivocal content of the thought. This is the only thought that can eventually break through the cloud of materialism that darkens our civilisation; the only one that can ultimately check the worst of those materialistic attempts which are even now being made to prolong man’s physical life as the only imaginable possibility of life, and to manipulate the process of procreation as the only way of improving it. The thought of the re-embodiment of the human spirit has more than a personal significance. It is of world significance that it be thought and re-thought, by everyone capable of penetrating its fundamental reality. For man is a cosmic evolving being, not a temporary earth-phenomenon. His self-consciousness is a fact obvious to all, to anthroposophist and non-anthroposophist alike, but it is only fully realised when it is seen as the result of divine creation. It partakes of that which in the beginning, when the divine fiat went forth, “Let us make man in our image,” presupposes a 8 divine self-consciousness from which it came. It was that working through aeons, first in the mineral, then the plant, then the animal, which has reached its consummation in man. Man has now come into that inheritance; though he has hardly begun to realize from whom he inherits the wealth he is heir to. We ignore man altogether if we look only at that which he indwells. It is what he has become capable of as a self-conscious being evolving through repeated incarnations, that establishes indubita­ bly the divine spiritual origins from which he sprang. Creation has reached its climax in man. It has created a being who can know himself as created. Even the gods can hardly go further along the line of created evolution, though they will await the create reunion they have given man the impulse for. He may still it is true destroy the promise of that creation. That is the risk of freedom; but only a being who is a true child of such a creative origin could be given the freedom with which such a risk could be taken. And so we come to the most outstanding thought of all; one which really belongs to those thoughts described above as those one ‘hardly dare think’ so far do they go beyond the capacity of our thought to fully comprehend: the thought that That which was there ‘in the beginning’ consummated the creative act by embodying Itself in that creation, in man, whereby “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” In spite of its immensity it is a thought which must ever and again be brought to mind, lest the others become meaningless. It must become something more than a pious belief of a traditional faith. It must be something which man can also think, with all the reality and confidence that thought has endowed him with; the thought that centralises and integrates thinking itself whatever else man may think ‘about.’ It is the Ur-thought of all man’s thinking potentiality, whereby thought can experience its own transfiguration in being; and being, the being of man, and the being of the world, is the whole essence of Anthroposophy. One does not need to study the whole of Rudolf Steiner’s work, to discover these essential thoughts; though the more one is able to study, the more they will be confirmed and illumined. 9 Their essentiality is not breadth, but depth; and depth is the fruit of the will that sustains these thoughts. That is not found in the books. It can only be found in the heart of him who reads, be his reading never so limited. And that will, living in the light and warmth of such thoughts as time and destiny give one access to, is what is meant here by ‘Essential Anthroposophy.’

This Waiting This too shall pass because it came to pass; This shattering of heart and soul and mind Will shape somehow to a coherent mass Of fruited deeds the mills of God will grind. The seeds lie fallow when the easy ways Wheel praiseless, barren toward a setting sun, And heedlessly man takes for granted days He never can retrieve once they are done. Hush now, O terrored pulsing of my heart; Be still, waste bleeding for a witless past — Not all in vain my being tears apart; The phoenix shall arise from fire at last. O Christ, I wait with patient willingness To serve — until your spirit curves to bless. Alma Graham Jenks

10 Water, Element of the Threshold in Modern Consciousness*

THEODOR SCHWENK

If we look into what has been going on in the world-wide water situation since our last meeting here two years ago, we will find that it has been steadily worsening. Efforts to clean up water pollution have simply not sufficed; the race is being won by pollution. The waters of the earth, the healing life-streams of our planet, have fallen ill and are presently engaged in a battle for their very lives. Our earlier inquiry into what living water is** ended with the report that foremost water experts are now stressing the fact that the great water problems confronting us are not just external onces, capable of solution by technical and economic means, but rather problems that can only be solved if every individual develops a new awareness, if the whole of humanity realizes that water is the element of life itself. Such a challenge cannot be taken lightly; we must try to grasp it in its full significance. We will make that attempt in the following commentary. One of the first questions to be asked is, of course, how a new “water-consciousness” can be created. To answer this concretely we will ask a further question: “What sort of “water-consciousness” do we have at present? What brought us to our modern consciousness, to the mentality that is obviously responsible for plunging us into the state of serious crisis we are *Digest of a lecture given at Herrischried, West Germany, in August 1969, for friends and supporters of the Institute fuer Stroemungswissenschaften. **Cf. The Golden Blade, issue of 1969. 11 facing today? A rational therapeutic approach always starts off with a diagnosis, a diagnosis based in turn on the previous history of the illness. Is there, perhaps, an imbalance in our modern consciousness, a one-sidedness which, reflected in practice, proves itself more and more clearly an enemy of life? Let us, for a moment, think back to the origin of this modern consciousness in the Greek people, in whom it is easy to trace its evolution. About 3,000 B.C. there lived in the regions later to be known as Greece a folk still capable of an immediate and lively experience of the forces of nature and of the beings underlying them. Let us call to mind Greece’s topography: its cliffs and caves and mountains; the stark contrast between its gentle shorelands and the precipitous formations of its interior with rivers coursing through them, disappearing and as suddenly reappearing; the many springs, the tremendous storms accom­ panied by lightning and the sound of thunder reverberating through the mountain gorges. One can understand how easily the youthfully impressionable people of that time took leave of their ordinary senses under the impact of such mighty forces and had inner picture-experiences of the creative and destructive powers at work in their environment. Any mental revolving of a question as to whether nymphs or gods of mountain, wood and stream really existed was simply unthinkable. The still youthful-minded population lived in a picture-world wholly unacquainted with abstraction, intent upon developing imagina­ tion to the fullest and living their daily lives in accordance with it. Archaeologists tell us that about 1900 B.C. there was an infusion of another element, the Indo-Germans, who came to live in these Greek landscapes among the original inhabitants. They brought with them a far greater leaning toward the abstract. They were quite at home with ideas of good and evil, of purity, of light and darkness. It seems to have come naturally to these invaders to lump together the many landscape deities of similar qualities and gradually apply to them the names we have learned to know them by. Despite a continuing real experience of these

12 divinities and the intermixing of the two groups of inhabitants, which led to the lofty culture of the classic age, there must have been some overall development in the direction of the abstract which, gradually merging with the living stream of consciousness of the original population, accounted for the way once-lofty gods were brought down to the human level. Henceforth, indeed, these gods were often thought of as possessing qualities human — all-too-human. We are all familiar with the further course of these developments. Greek philosophy was born, and the Greek science of the natural philosophers up to the time of Plato and Aristotle. It is perhaps not so generally known that Aristotle developed a many-faceted science that made exact findings in fields such as meteorology and the acoustics applied in the great Greek theatres. From this dawning of scientific thought, developments led on to eventuate in the mentality of modern times with its wide-awake but matter-oriented thinking. Along the way great rhythmic alternations took place between the ancient pictorial form of insight and a thin, abstract thought-life; and the battle between them broke out ever and again. The development of human consciousness to the point where once-living experience was reduced to an abstract level h ad to end in disowning that past experience. “For modern man there are only calculable natural laws and natural forces, which can be expressed and grasped in formulas.” How is a mere formula to convey any experience of the wisdom at the heart of things, or how is a coarse-meshed sieve — made to screen out all but crude factual material — to capture the subtler aspects of reality? The path that has led from wisdom to crude fact is the path that leads from the Tree of Life to the Tree of Knowledge, with all associated consequences for man’s behavior in the natural and social realms. Lord Bacon, who lived from 1561 to 1626, demanded that religion and science be separated. Henceforth only what could be measured, weighed and counted mattered, and the slogan of

13 modern times became “Away with every trace of myth!” The present inquiry is concerned with the life-element, water. Water too has fallen victim to the abstractionist trend, to mechanization. Once the most revered element in every genuine religious ceremony, symbol of the wisdom at work in every phase of living nature, water is now thoroughly “de-mytholo- gized.” It is just “liquid weight,” a source of energy, a means of expediting ships and waste-matter, a substance suited to running pumps and turbines. Its capacity to drive machinery can be calculated, and this is taken to prove that it is a dead substance. Water becomes just a source of measurable power alongside such other familiar items as pressure, draft, weight, gravitation, inertia, centrifugal force, friction, electrical and nuclear energy. These energies are harnessed in accordance with the laws of cause and effect and make it possible to construct the machinery and appliances on which our civilization is founded. The goal, the ideal of this development, is the freeing of human energies, — in other words, complete automation even in the life-realms, complete automation with its restrictions. These surround human life increasingly, from the cradle to the grave, and have materialized into an environment that we can see and touch. Before this technology could grow up around us, it had to have become a reality in engineering concept. Death-related laws had to participate in the thinking of the engineer at his drafting board. A subtle death-process played a godfather role at the conceiving and designing of the refrigerator, the vacuum cleaner, the automobile, the turbine. Natural laws, stripped of wisdom and projected into matter! But this death-process offers a tremendous schooling. Any carelessness in applying the measurements of a formula, any least slip-up in control, can mean violating the laws that obtain in a given instance and lead to catastrophe. The slightest inaccuracy becomes outwardly evident. Surely the achievement of such absolute conscientiousness is no less valuable as training than are the objects it creates! Absolute honesty, work that leaves no loophole for any sort of pretense — this makes 14 thinking crystal-clear and gives it firm contours. Such thinking takes on matter’s stability. Calculation has to be accurate and fit perfectly into the technological spot it was designed to fill. Even the discovery of the formula inherent in some phenomenon or other requires mental acuteness, a capacity to analyze, to split things apart, to dissect, to separate the essential from the non-essential. We have been concerned here to show that while technologi­ cal thinking nurtures exactness, it does so at the cost of engaging in a death-process. The laws operative in a death-related realm are carried along in the flow of living thought. Indeed, a life and death struggle has constantly to be taking place in all such thinking. For maximum economy must be attained, the machine rendered almost 100% efficient, the forces of nature played off against one another. We still have to achieve knowledge at the cost of including death-processes; the Tree of Knowledge is inexorably linked to death! Should it surprise us, then, that nothing escapes the taint of this death-related way of thinking, from the abstract shapes with which we are surrounded to the policy of straightening rivers? Though leaving nothing to be desired in the technical perfection with which it is carried out, this operation completely does away with the rhythmic alternating of the life element. The last step in de-mythologizing is the “final clearance” of everything which man once experienced as divine. This thinking done in the realm of death-oriented laws projects an accurate picture of itself in current water develop­ ments and can be witnessed in the competitive struggles in modern economic life. It creates attitudes that course through the life- arteries of man and nature; the outer scene reflects the inner. Nature can stand these developments for awhile, long enough for mankind to complete this schooling of its thinking, but it cannot do so indefinitely. If this type of thinking were to continue applying its merciless logic too long and infect the social sphere, it would lead to catastrophe wherever life is the thing that matters. And this is bound to occur first of all in the case of water, life’s own element.

15 Technologists and scientists are also aware that catastrophe is in the making, but they do not recognize a specific kind of thinking as the cause. Nor is the right therapy to be found in the “new spirituality” called for at the 1969 conference of Nobel prize-winners, meaning the founding of new universities. That is just where the cause of the fatal developments of recent decades can be sought and found. A true therapy can only be arrived at by making a correct diagnosis and a corresponding plan of treatment. We should therefore look to see where the trouble lies here. It lies in the postulate that everything in nature can be “explained” by taking recourse to death-related laws. This is simply not true. There are life-related laws as well. Modern consciousness thus contains an inbuilt error in thinking, to wit, that the only laws that obtain are inorganic, causal-mechanical ones. And indeed, a thinking schooled atthe hand of what is dead can scarcely be expected to come up with any other kind of postulate after having driven life out of the scene before it. If you examine any current scientific journal you will find the word “mechanism” in use wherever biological facts are under discussion: the mechanism of cell division, the mechanism of heredity, the mechanism of growth, the mechanism of adjustment, the mechanism of enzyme catalysis, the mechanism of photosynthesis, the mechanism of the cosmos. — Cosmic mechanics! Yet it was just in connection with the latter that Kepler, the foremost astronomer of the Western world, spoke of a wisdom-permeated organism. Thus far our inquiry has been devoted to searching out the causes of the present water crisis, for the therapy we are looking for must be based on a correct diagnosis. We found nature possessing, in addition to its inorganic aspects, realms governed by organic laws which are the polar opposite of the inorganic. It must therefore be possible to train ourselves in a way of thinking in which life courses — a thinking impregnated with the kind of laws that rule living nature. This is not a quantitative problem in the sense of needing more universities; it is qualitative.

16 What changes in practice can we expect to see issuing from a life-related thinking? Let us take at least a brief look at the answer to this vital question. Thinking of this kind would certainly also come to objective expression in the natural environment. Thus, a truly life-related type of thinking would find reflection in a corresponding landscape treatment. The straight­ ening of rivers and other such life-arteries would cease in favor of returning them to a properly meandering course. Thinking restored to a capacity to take living formative impulses would be flowing thought and hence prove hospitable to the flowing formative forces inherent in systems of life-related laws. Within us, flowing wisdom (such as was made the subject of our previous meeting); outside us, in nature, a water-element that is again allowed to be the carrier of wisdom-permeated laws, a water-element that works as a regulator in landscapes, restored to a healthy state of being. To show specifically what is meant here let us cite several typical life-factors: Life works chiefly as a synthesizer, forming wholes that are greater than the sum of all their parts. Life moves rhythmically, not in a mechanically measured beat. Life is always a little bit eccentric. Life is responsive to cosmic rhythms, — indeed, entirely governed by them. Hence it flows with the flow of time, in cycles rather than in a straight-line, mechanical hook-up. Life always leaves itself free space for maneuvering; it never submits to exact calculation. It moves in cycles wherein metamorphoses and heightenings take place. It is attuned to the cosmos, to endlessness in time and space. Hence it is consonant with the highest form of qualitative mathematics, projective or synthetic geometry. We cannot speak of cause and effect in the life-realm, for there each is simultaneously the other. Considered from every angle life is wisdom-saturated. Ma­ chines are limited to just one or just a very few functions; they are mere “mechanisms.” Life can never be fitted into that category. 17 Now we come to decisive questions: Is there a bridge that leads over from one set of laws to the other? Is there a process that demonstrates the life-function as such? Is there a corresponding bridge between the two realms that human consciousness can use? There is indeed, and it is water, that symbol of streaming life, — water, every quality of which reveals its life-origin. It is water, where all life-qualities are focussed. It is water, focal point of wisdom and hence the medium whereby wisdom is made available to living organisms. Water’s flow constantly links life and death. It is the mediator between the two, and its surface provides a common frontier in nature where they meet. Death is continuously being overcome there. Man’s thinking is in a similar position. We spoke of synthetic geometry as suited to the life-realm. It can actually be regarded as an exact method for schooling thinking for that realm. A moment ago we mentioned a few of life’s characteristic attributes. They are the very same ones that could be listed as applying to water, and the same too that characterize thinking when we transform it into living thought. Now let us look a little more closely at water’s characteristics as a frontier-surface. In the chemical realm water lies exactly at the neutral point between acid and alkaline, and is therefore able to serve as the mediator of change in either direction. In fact, water is the instrument of chemical change wherever it occurs in life and nature. In the light-realm, too, water occupies the middle ground between light and darkness. The rainbow, that primal phenome­ non of color, makes its shining appearance in and through the agency of water. In the realm of gravity, water counters heaviness with levity; thus, objects immersed in water take on buoyancy. In the heat-realm water takes a middle position between radiation and conduction. It is the greatest heat conveyer in the earth’s organism, transporting inconceivable amounts of warmth

18 from hot regions to cooler ones by means of the process known as heat-convection. In the morphological realm water favors the spherical; we see this in the drop form. Pitting the round against the radial, it calls forth that primal form of life, the spiral. In every area water assumes the role of mediator. Encompassing both life and death, it constantly wrests the former from the latter. Water does not constitute a linear divider in the sense of a bar separating one part of nature from another. It alternates between right and left with a living pendulum swing, not only in the sense of creating meandering patterns but in a functional sense as well, thus serving to relate extremes. Which is to say that water is the primary organ of rhythm, the heart of nature, the element in which we can discern nature’s heart-beat. As such it is the polar opposite of a mechanical pumping device: its alternating swing is free. And this eccentricity, this subtle freedom it retains, makes it the element that keeps nature from becoming mechanical, i.e., from dying. Indeed, water is the overcomer of the mechanical, and that is why it is so important to imbue thinking with the qualities of water. We find the watery element present everywhere in nature; it is one of the most ubiquitous of substances. As an entity it is all-embracing, the repository of cosmic wisdom, which is found in its highest manifestation in the human organism. Water is like a giant extended over the entire earth, and yet it embraces all wisdom in each tiniest drop. Hence it is both a giant and a child, and as such suited to be the mediating agent when the human spirit descends from its diffusion in the cosmos into bodily incarnation. It is indeed true, as science tells us, that man comes to land out of the water, the element of wisdom. In its first stage the embryo consists almost entirely of fluids, and only gradually does it solidify the originally fluid organs. At birth man leaves life’s paradisal garden and its streams of living water to find his way into the statics of the solid earth. In its realm he develops the capacity to walk, speak and think,

19 grasps hold of objects and acquaints himself with them. His biography begins, like a journey through a land of hills and valleys, always renewing his questioning as to where the road started and what it is leading to. Is there a connection with a higher world, a re-ligion? Is there such a thing as a higher birth into that world? Perhaps we can understand better now what Christ meant in His conversation with Nicodemus when He spoke of ascending to a higher world through being born again of water and the spirit-breath of air, — spoke of a rebirth that leads man back again to heaven, a birth undertaken fully consciously and under the sign of the same complex of living laws that governs water. Verily, verily I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. — Gospel of St. John, Chap. III, verse 5. We are of the opinion that the solution of today’s huge water problems has never found more precise expression than in the cited talk with Nicodemus. Without a new awareness of water’s spiritual nature we will be unable to save this planet that has been given us as our habitation. Translation by

20 Old Age and Retirement

ERWIN PHILLIPS

One of the most widely accepted catch phrases of recent years has been the generation gap. Many people find it easy to state reasons for the condition; none so far has provided a remedy. One important aspect of this generation gap is the matter of old age and retirement. What is needed is a new look at the relationship of one generation to another and a re-orientation of the whole problem. But a solution is possible only if we have a true understanding of the existing relations of life and its development. And here Nature herself can be our teacher. Observing the development of the human life span, we discover certain unchanging natural laws to which man pays all too little attention. The year follows the quite distinct and regular pattern of spring, summer, autumn and winter. We all know that the seasons are the visible expression of the interaction and co-operation of the earth with the cosmos, of “Mother Earth” and “Father Heaven” as represented especially by the moon and sun. In a similar way we may follow the course of human life on earth through four basic “seasons.” Beginning with spring-like youth, there follow the age of summer, ripening to maturity, then the autumn season of approaching old age, and finally a wintertime of gradual withdrawal from active physical life. The real problem, one feels, lies in the manner in which we, as individuals, try to provide for our own retirement and for the old age of those unable to do so for themselves. There exist today a variety of ways in which as individuals and groups we attempt to provide for the retirement period: saving as much as possible by deposits in banks; acquiring assets, pension funds, life insurance, Social Security, Welfare. 21 All these methods, whether for one person or for groups, require, for their operation and their very existence, the setting up of extensive organizations which, however, swallow a large portion of the money paid by the beneficiary. These organizations, moreover, are full of loopholes, even abuses, and the benefits they dispense often have to be scaled down due to inflation, political change or other causes beyond control. Taken together, they constitute a chaotic, complicated, impractical and costly system. And alongside this system, which nevertheless fails to provide for millions of our elder citizens, there exists another complicated bureaucratic organization under the expensive supervision of political administration in the form of State and City Welfare. The support of these various, often inefficient systems rests upon a complex of enforced taxes, deductions, levies and other involuntary financial contributions which are derived exclusively from the surplus of the productive economic realm. And in spite of these numerous organizations designed to prevent want, there still exist among the aged many cases of neglect, suffering and misery. For besides those who still enjoy a certain degree of physical health in old age, there remain the sick, the crippled and the blind, many of them improperly cared for. Independent organizations motivated by private or religious charity, by political interests or by such groups as labor unions try to fill this crying need, but everywhere co-ordination is lacking. In general there exists no encompassing, scientifically oriented system based on a clear social consciousness. Let us note again how life moves, like that of the earth year, through a succession of seasons. Since every season of the year consists in principle of three months and every moon cycle of four weeks, so also can the life-seasons of man be subdivided. Such sub-division can be seen most distinctly in the “spring­ time” of man, his youth. The first subdivision reaches from birth to readiness for school, indicated by the child’s change of teeth about the seventh year. The following seven years culminates in puberty, and finally the third seven-year period completes his physical maturity and growth. Thus we reach with

22 the twenty-first year the grown-up stage of man. During the next period, that of summertime, stretching through about forty-two years, man reaches the fullness of earthly conscious life and, at its midpoint, at the age of forty-two, attains the peak of his life’s activities. This is sustained for another twenty-one years; and then, at about the sixty-third year, begins the autumn, the more or less rapid decline of the bodily constitution and physical abilities, until we arrive at the wintertime of life, and finally the end of earthly existence. Childhood and youth are periods of inexperience and preparatory development toward a full, self-conscious physical and mental maturity. The senior period and old age are a time of rich life experience and knowledge but of declining physical capacities, a period of post maturity. In between lies the mature and responsible middle generation in full possession of its powers and activity for production. At this time a man carries not only responsibility for his own development and care, but also, in an ever lessening degree, for that of the younger generation, and in an ever increasing manner for that of the older people. Since the younger group is always preparing to enter upon its long period of productivity and the members of the oldest group are continually leaving that period, it follows naturally that the middle generation should bear the burden and the responsibility for the support of all three simultaneously. Any plan to implement such a system must begin with a recognition of the fact that the problem of old age and retirement cannot and must not be handled either in the realm of government, in the civil-rights-political realm or in the purely economic domain. As the development and education of the maturing youth is the task of the cultural domain, so also, in the final analysis, it is not the task of government but of those who concern themselves with matters of culture to serve those members of the community who have passed beyond self-sup­ porting capacity due to old age. Here we are using the conception of the three social spheres of which Rudolf Steiner speaks in his Threefold Commonwealth and which he proposes to separate so that they may find one

23 another again in a free, organic relationship. These three spheres are the spiritual or cultural sphere, the sphere of justice and of rights or government, and that of economics. The regulations, the setting of the rules, is the task of civil rights, and the actual satisfaction of the bodily needs and requirements of the old age section of the population takes place in the economic realm. But the implementation of the regulations, the surveillance and control of all related activities is a purely human and cultural concern. The basic organic change in dealing here with the activities of the mature generation should be that no one prepares for his own old age by any contributions whatever. At present it is the custom that every productive person tries to take care of his own future in the ways noted, but experience has shown that this can be a risky procedure. The actual value of money put aside for future use in whatever form will be determined only at the time of its consumption. For this reason it is clear that, with the unknown value of its money, the mature generation cannot provide adequately for its own future. It can, however, by its own contribution provide for the simultaneous senior generation. Then, similarly, as the juniors, who also receive their support from the “parent generation,” emerge from springtime into summer, they become grown-ups and can support the new senior class, so lately itself the middle generation. By this arrangement, the grown-up generation always provides not only for its own upkeep but also for the seniors and for the development of the juniors. As the juniors receive their entire support from the mature generation, so in a reciprocal manner, the same juniors will repay the older generation for their life maintenance. Of course this is not conceived as an individual child-parent- grandparent relationship. It should be viewed in its general, impersonal aspect. It may be seen that in this light the present attitude of “invest-save-insure” for one’s own old age appears as an egotistic and anti-social conception. One result of a plan such as is outlined here would be that

24 the mature generation contribute regularly to a senior fund, the amounts and administration of which be determined by an organ of the cultural domain. The administrative work could be handled by capable seniors on a voluntary, unpaid basis. Benefits and privileges for seniors could be introduced and extended. Public transportation, free visits to museums, concerts, theaters and movies could be arranged, as well as homes erected upon a non-commercial basis and administered as much as possible by experienced seniors on a voluntary basis. In this way the contributions from the mature generation toward the gratis livelihood of the seniors would be considerably reduced. An original spirit of co-operation and mutual service thus would be cultivated in an atmosphere of gratitude and serenity. For it is evident that self-administered senior homes provided by the middle generation must not mean isolation and separation of the generations. On the contrary, there should be a benevolent order without undue influence in the actual life conditions, a realization of respectful, mutual independence. In the political legislative field, the elected administrative officials would come from the active members of the mature, self-supporting category of the community. Active seniors, however, should have their own chamber, rightly to be called a “senate,” operating solely in a counseling, advisory capacity for the younger chamber, out of long life experience and practical knowledge. At the moment there does not exist a sound organic set-up of such legislative activities. It can happen that a young man barely thirty years old becomes a “senator,” whereas an eighty-five- year-old member of the lower house may already have become remote from the actual spirit of the time. The basic principle of the voluntary, non-salaried co-operation of the senior class should always be upheld regardless of what activity each member may engage in. This principle will make a constant appeal to the idealism and social conscience of the older generation and for the next, following generation it will create an exemplary, socially sound effect. The basic pre-condition for the actual acceptance of such an

25 organic social-minded orientation in a community is, as noted, an insight into the actual relationships of human life and development. Nature shows us the polarity in the course of life, and in between the two poles lies the living, full activity of the mature, responsible generation. Only if the obligations of this middle generation are fulfilled in the right spirit of selfless devotion, can a harmonious community life of the three age periods be achieved. In this organic sequence is contained a truly wonderful ethical and social element. Out of this could arise a community continually re-invigorated with a living spirit, where an intense process of rejuvenation and healing could take place.

Tribute to A Teacher For Olin D. Wannamaker We hope that we may climb our human years As you have done, with quiet dignity; Not shielded from all trials or earth’s fears But turning each one into victory; To see the hardening tendencies, yet know That stones can clear — become as bright as gold, That waters can reflect light as they flow; These are the visions which your life has told. We bring symbolic laurel leaves this day And celebrate the greatness of the deeds That you have shown us all along the way To point us upward where the Spirit leads; We bow in gratitude that we have heard The voice of one who caught the burning Word. Alma Graham Jenks

26 Soloviev and the Task of Russia

CHRISTY BARNES

PART I Soloviev was a forerunner. And one of the most interesting tasks for a teacher — or for anyone, for that matter — is to seek out those great pioneers of modern and future thought who are to be found in almost every country and culture; and then to explore the inner landscapes they provide, climb the crags of their rocky conceptions and breathe the high, clear air and large perspectives of their insights. If we are to stir the imagination of the younger generation, give transparency and mobility to their widening powers of vision and toughen their mental grip, we must find out as examples for them, to help to train these capacities, those great figures who can help us to nourish and exercise their spirits on rugged journeys. It is in this sense of discovery that this article is written. My interest in Soloviev grew during a course in Russian literature that I was giving in high school. What I have brought together here is only in small part what one would teach. It is rather the kind of background which enables one to illuminate what one is teaching and to make it significant. It was with good reason that Rudolf Steiner gave the name of the to the building he designed to house the activities growing out of Spiritual Science. In this way he rooted his work in the most productive soil of the culture in which he found himself. In Goethe he found powers of thought and observation which, actively illumined, can prepare the ground for Spiritual Science. Such men need to be found in other countries. Interestingly enough, once one comes to know one 27 such forerunner, one discovers that he has already found out others of his kind, has spun threads of friendship across the seas and built indestructible bridges of insight between peoples and from his own time to our own. In some respect these men are more contemporary now than they were in their own eras. Goethe, Carlyle, Coleridge, MacDonald, Emerson, Thoreau, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky are some of these. Soloviev is another. Indeed, he has already provided a link with the Goetheanum for a significant group of Russian poets and artists. Margareta Woloshin, a Russian painter who worked on the first Goetheanum, writes in her book The Green Snake, parts of which have appeared in translation in this Journal: “The people whom I came to know in the spring of 1910 in Moscow belonged to a circle that had a strong connection with Soloviev. The philosopher himself had been dead for ten years, but his spirit was livingly present in various groups in Moscow. There was alive in these friends of mine a certain Apocalyptical mood and a sense that there might now be possible a new revelation, a spiritual knowledge, a concrete, esoteric Christian way. It was interesting how the mystic Soloviev connected some of these friends to the Goetheanum. According to their point of view, natural science should be permeated with Christianity, at the same time spiritual science should be pursued with the exactness of natural science. Most of these people were highly cultivated, broadly educated members of the academic world. Soon after, the greater number of them came to Anthropos­ ophy.” One of these was Assia Turgeniev Bugayev, later to etch the glass windows for the present Goetheanum. For years one saw her in Dornach, a quiet, independent figure with her pale green, Slavonic eyes and broad cheek bones, sitting in a corner of the Kantine drinking coffee and smoking endless cigarettes. Her husband, B. N. Bugayev, whose pen name was Andrey Belyi, has been called the most profound exponent of the Russian symbolist poets. His work appears in almost every collection of modern Russian poetry along with poems by Maximillian Woloshin, husband of Margareta, and those of Alexander Bloc.

28 All three men were acquainted with the work of Rudolf Steiner. It is not only for Russians that Soloviev can kindle a new sense of knowledge, but it was perhaps only in Russia that he could have been born. If we are to understand him and his significance, it will be necessary to gain an insight into the nature and potentialities of the culture that gave him birth.

The Task of Russia Just as we, today, have the task of developing that consciousness of soul by means of which we can look at nature and at ourselves objectively, and Hegel’s philosophy marks a high point of achievement in evolving this detached, objective awareness; just so, Rudolf Steiner tells us, is Soloviev’s philosophy a seed for that of the next historical epoch to be centered in Russia, when men will become capable of receiving a higher, more social member of their being than is the consciousness soul, which we are now maturing. This “spirit self” will enable a greater sense of brotherhood and community to come about. It is interesting that he does not use the word develop but the verb receive. And it is one of the tasks of the Russian folk soul to cultivate a vital receptiveness. In order to do this, certain powers of soul needed to be kept untouched, virginal. How have the wise forces of history worked to bring this about? For centuries Russia was isolated from Western intellectuality by the Orthodox Church, which allowed only the Gospels to be printed, and by the hierarchical form of society which kept most of its population in serfdom under the rule of her noblemen, the Boyars. Russia was turned inward and Eastward, the waters of her spirit dammed back into a great reservoir of latent power. At the same time her deep love of her Mother Earth, the Cosmic Father of the blessed Child was sheltered and kept alive. This love pervaded the fields, the very air, the sunlight that glanced off the green and golden domes and glistened in the snow; it rang and boomed in the tones of the bells that pealed out over towns and cities. It was on the lips of every nobleman and peasant as they

29 greeted and blessed one another and called out joyfully on Easter Day, “Christ is risen!” It sent out its tiny sparks across the snowbound steppes from the candles lit below the icons in lonely huts, and permeated the color, the baking-fragrance and drama of countless saints days and festivals. Russia was kept long in her pictorial, receptive childhood, protected from the awakening prick of the intellect, gathering her own force. The Russians, Rudolf Steiner points out, have greater mobility of soul than the average Westerner and can grasp the spiritual with greater ease, but they do not penetrate down into the physical world as deeply nor yet have so sharp a realization of the ego. They tend to live in a dream-like atmosphere, but with great intensity. They are waiting their time. One who reads Russian literature cannot fail to be impressed by the richness of their emotions, the depths of soul of which they are capable, nor by how difficult it is for the ego to take a firm, directing hold on the dramatic gamut of the Russian temperament. One already experiences in their nature the duality which is destined to develop still more strikingly (the higher controlling the lower) in the future. Few nations are at once so kind and so cruel; none so capable of realism and idealism in the same breath, so torn between nihilism and religious conviction, so quick to acclaim their great writers nor so swift to exile them. In their fairy tales, which deal not with a single hero but with many, and in their novels, which describe clusters of characters of almost equal interest, there is already evident their feeling for the collective community it is their future task to bring to fruition. It was Peter the Great who flung open for them the door to the West. He broke the hold of the Boyars, imported skilled foreigners, made French the court language and introduced Western thought, techniques and luxuries. Catharine carried this trend further. From now on, despite a number of attempts to close the door to the West, Russia was to be exposed to its materialism and intellectuality. She could no longer foster the forces of childhood only; but she still had great resources of vitality and receptivity.

30 And now, like Athene springing full-grown from the head of Zeus, Russian literature emerged in all its youthful stature in the person of Pushkin. In a little over a century’s span, the first wave of Russian literature, in one powerful sweep, rose through Gogol, Lermontov, Turgeniev, reached its peak in Dostoevsky and Tolstoi and plunged into Chekov’s twilight, breaking in the foam of Andreyev and sinking to the lower depths of Gorki, while a new wave was preparing to crest in Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. A folk is an ordered organism; Assia Bugayev quotes Dr. Steiner as saying in her book Memories of Rudolf Steiner. Russia has already achieved such a living organism. It has a nervous system: that is Gogol and Dostoevsky; it has a muscular system: Tolstoi. However it has not yet a skeleton. For other European peoples natural science is the skeleton. For them it is right that it is so, for they can school their thinking upon it. The Russians, however, have a feeling that they must save their thinking for something else. For them natural science is poison. Only spiritual science can be a skeleton for them and to this Goetheanism is the way. At another time Steiner said to her: Tolstoi and Soloviev are two spearheads pointing to the future of Russia. Through them will come good impulses for the future. They are both characteristic for her. In the West, people always think they must do something. For Tolstoi the not doing is much more important than the doing. In him are already the first beginnings of the sixth post-Atlantean period. He tried in his Calendar to bring cosmic rhythms into life. That smacks of the future. His conception of not resisting evil by force is an important striving toward a new Christianity, but Tolstoi has not yet found an active

31 relationship to Christianity and evil. That I have shown in my statue in its forward striding, effective presence of the Christ that has in the gesture of the arms nothing battling or aggressive. Once when Steiner was speaking to Margareta Woloshin of Tolstoi, she asked him whether it was not Dostoevsky who was the more significant representative of the Christian impulse in Russia; whereupon he answered: Tolstoi's idea of brotherhood is more forceful, powerful, and will persevere. Dostoevsky stands as a penitent before Christ for all mankind.

Soloviev’s Early Years Only in Russia could Soloviev have found the qualities which he needed in order to develop his own capacities and the substance of his thoughts. How and when did he enter into such a folk. What were his chosen inheritance and his childhood like? What manner of man was he and how have Russia and the West responded to his work? In 1900, in a preface to Soloviev’s War and Christianity, Stephen Graham wrote, “Vladimir Soloviev is Russia’s greatest philosopher and one of her greatest poets, a serene and happy writer ... He was a seeker and also a seer, a thinker and also a singer.” Solzhenitzyn mentions him in his Nobel Lecture. Still, he is little known today. Even those who are well acquainted with Dos­ toevsky may know little or nothing of his indebtedness to Soloviev. It is difficult to find much by or about him in the library in America — or even in Russia now, says Sonia Tomara Clarke, distinguished journalist who has lectured on Soloviev, after re­ turning from a visit there recently. She remembers well, though, how as a girl in her native Russia she was allowed to attend meet­

32 ings of the Soloviev Society in the home of one of her relatives. Vladimir Soloviev was born prematurely on January 16, 1853, into a cultivated Moscow family. His mother, a “Little Russian,” had a deeply religious nature and claimed a philosopher in her ancestry. His father, a well-known professor at the University of Moscow, wrote the first exhaustive history of Russia, in twenty-nine volumes. He had traveled and studied in Europe. Influenced by Hegelian thought, he endeavored to show how history reveals the organic evolution of mankind. The household was filled with an atmosphere of significant, hearty conversation and of reading aloud. Distinguished guests came and went. “There was nothing of the cheap wit and mental meanness that so often sterilize the creative intelligence of otherwise wonderful children.” wrote Stephen Graham. All of his brothers and sisters achieved distinction in life and letters. His grandfather, a priest, consecrated Vladimir at the age of eight to the service of God. From an early age he had prophetic dreams and felt a mystical reverence for nature. Everything about him was animated by his fantasy; he named his friendly pencil, Andrew. He read the lives of the saints, loved poetry and learned folklore from peasants with whom he felt happily at home. When he was nine years old, a little girl whom he loved was indifferent to him. In a lonely moment during mass the world around him vanished; the blue of the sky was all about him and in his soul. Through this blue he saw a vision of Eternal Womanhood, Sophia, woven of the azure ether and holding in her hand a flower grown in no earthly country. She nodded, smiled radiantly and disappeared in the mist. His soul became blind to worldly things. But not for long. His was a naturally sunny, out-going disposition. He was full of animation and an infectious hilarity. He made friends with his father’s visitors, many of them full of Western ideas. These fascinated him. At fourteen, after reading the life of Christ by a Western author, he proclaimed himself an atheist, made Socialism and Communism his ideals, and threw

33 the family icons out into the garden. When he went to the university, he turned to the study of natural science and Western philosophy. But his innately religious and thoughtful nature remained unsatisfied; he experienced an emptiness in natural scientific thought. While studying Spinoza, he became convinced of the total spiritual unity of the world; a living sense of God’s reality grew upon him. At eighteen he underwent a religious crisis and returned to the Russian Orthodox Church. However the powers of reason which he had applied in his studies he did not reject. At twenty-one, having passed through the University of Moscow, he joined the Theological Faculty. At this time he published The Crisis of Western Philosophy in which he maintained that it was possible to approach Christianity through reason. My true mission, he said, is to work at the theoretic aspect of evolving Christianity. Christianity has been destroyed in its false form by the development of science and philosophy. It is time now to reestablish true Christianity, to bring eternal content into rational form. The practical fulfillment of Christianity lies in the far future. . . . My aim is to justify the faith of our fathers by raising it to a new level of intelligent consciousness. It was after reading this book that Tolstoi wrote: My acquaintance with Soloviev added very little that was new to my knowledge, but it ... caused a philosophic ferment in me and confirmed many things, in clarifying thoughts of paramount necessity for the remainder of my life and for my death, thoughts that were of such comfort to me that, had I the ability and the time, I should try to pass on to others. A few years later, Tolstoi passed through what his wife called “the terrible years,” a religious crisis which changed the course

34 of his life and work. This came to a head about the year 1879. Out of it emerged the book My Confession. Everything he was to write and do from then on was to be tested in the struggle for his individual conception of Christianity. This he approached through thought and his consuming love of truth, and so independently that he was to be excommunicated from the Church. In this battle for Christianized thinking, he had responded to Soloviev as to a kindred spirit. Because of jealousy and intrigue at the University, Soloviev was sent, in 1875, to London to study medieval philosophy and mysticism. He had already explored spiritualism and, though himself a good medium, had rejected it. Now and for some years to come, gnosticism and theosophy became his chief studies. In the British museum, in the same building in which Karl Marx had worked upon Das Kapital, Soloviev, as he bent over a book, once more experienced how the walls around him melted into azure mist, out of which there formed itself the radiant face of Sophia, the “Virgin of the Rainbow Door.” This time she said to him: “Be in Egypt,” and disappeared. So to Egypt he travelled, ostensibly to study Arabic; and — his tall thin figure draped in a long black cloak, a high black silk hat on his head — he went into the desert, only to be captured by Beduins, who understandably took him for the Devil himself. Reassured by his mild manner, they withdrew and left him alone surrounded by the distant howling of jackals. There in the desert he had his third and last vision of Sophia, of whom he was to write later in his lectures on Godmanhood. Of this experience he wrote: My steadfast gaze embraced it all as one; The seas and rivers sparkled blue beneath me, And distant woods and mountains clad in snow. I saw it all and all was one fair image Of wondrous beauty, holding all as one. The boundless was within its form enclosed; Before me and in me is you alone.

35 He returned to Moscow but soon left the University because of disputes involving the Slavophiles. Though he had once been one of their number, he combated their narrow-mindedness. He spoke of three social forces: a tendency to socialism — which had been exaggerated in the East by the Musselmen; a tendency to individualism — found to an extreme in the West; and the tendency to respect God in other individuals and societies — which should be realized by the Slavs. One sees here Soloviev’s understanding for the social polarities that we struggle to bring into relationship today and his sense of Russia’s future task. His views actually contented neither Slavophiles nor Westernizers. In 1877 he moved to St. Petersburg and remained with the University there until 1881.

Dostoevsky and Soloviev When Soloviev was twenty, he met the fifty-one year old Dostoevsky. The novelist — arch explorer of the borderlines of consciousness in insanity, crime, suicide and illness — was already a world-renowned figure and had written all his important works except for The Brothers Karamazov. A distance was widening between him and some of his closest friends, and Soloviev’s engaging, deeply religious nature was a welcome refreshment. Almost penniless, the poet-philosopher gave away money and even clothes to the needy, loved animals and was full of good natured jokes and puns. He had just broken his engagement at this time. Though several times deeply in love, he never married. In 1878, Dostoevsky suffered a tragic blow. His little son, Alyosha, two and a half years old, was stricken with an epileptic fit. After three hours he died. Dostoevsky loved the boy dearly, and he had to watch him die of the disease which he himself had bequeathed him, a disease which he attributed to the drunkenness of his own father, the boy’s grandfather. On the surface he bore the blow quietly. Only his wife realized what a devastating effect it had upon his inner life. She recommended that he make a pilgrimage to the famous monastery Optina 36 Pustyn, where the holy man, Father Ambrose, lived. Gogol and hundreds of others had been confessed by him. Soon Tolstoi was also to visit there on foot. Furthermore, she suggested that Dostoevsky take Soloviev with him for companionship. Optina Pustyn lay much further off than the two men had realized. Their travel together by carriage stretched itself out over a week’s time. Perhaps this was one of the most important intervals in the lives of both men. What must have been their conversations, their exchange of ideas! Soloviev may have spoken in an especially living way about his ideas on the Christian State, the Antichrist and the three temptations. It was then that Dostoevsky confided to the other the vision he believed he had had of Christ and his plan for the Karamazovs.* Of their meetings during the winter in St. Petersburg, E. H. Carr writes in his biography of the novelist, “The exchange provided mutual inspiration for both, and Dostoevsky seems to have derived from these conversations the definite religious, even ecclesiastical train of thought which scarcely appears in his earlier works but emerges into prominence in The Brothers Karamazov. At the monastery Dostoevsky had two private audiences with Father Ambrose, who was to appear in The Brothers as Father Zossima and give expression there to convictions which had been maturing in the heart of its author: “Love every man, even in his sin; love every leaf ... Choose humble love and you will subdue the world ... walk around yourself and see if your image is a seemly one.” Now Dostoevsky visited, for the first time in many years, the scenes of his childhood. He remembered some happy years on this family estate, but it also brought to mind the cruel murder of his father by his own serfs, whose bitter hatred he had earned. Dostoevsky brooded over the death of his son. He saw the walls of the monastery before him, and the new work which he had already begun to plan grew in his mind. His dissolute

* An account of this, given to the Newsletter of the in America by Sonia Clarke, appears in the Spring issue of 1964. 37 father, Father Ambrose, his own former atheistic self were all interwoven there. His hero, a figure akin to but far more self-possessed, healthy and effectual than Prince Myshkin of The Idiot, he named Alyosha after his little son. But Alyosha’s sunny, lovable, religious disposition in the book belongs to Soloviev. Father Zossima sends Alyosha “from the monastery out into the world.” “It is time not to run away from, but to go out into the world,” said Soloviev in one of his twelve lectures on Godmanhood, which he started to give in the spring before the journey to Optina Pustyn. They were difficult lectures, beautifully prepared and enthusiastically received. Both Dostoev­ sky and Tolstoi attended them. In them he set forth with great clarity the duality inherent in the being of Christ and dealt with the three temptations. These lectures probably embody much of the substance which led Rudolf Steiner to write in The Mission of Folk Souls: Soloviev's philosophy is more deeply permeated with the Christ idea than any other outside of Spiritual Science ... in which it is found at a higher level ... He recognized the dual nature of Christ: the human and the divine. We must understand the two natures of Christ and the union of both at a higher stage. As long as we have not grasped this duality, we have not understood Christ in His fullness. Some themes from these lectures pervade both “The Grand Inquisitor,” a story told in The Brothers Karamazov, and “Antichrist” by Soloviev. One is struck by how they both emerge from the same background of thought. “Christianity was given to men as a morally historical task to be accomplished by their free efforts,” wrote Soloviev. Freedom and its relation to the three temptations form the central theme of both stories. In “Antichrist” the reader is confronted with a superman, brilliant, handsome, virtuous. “But he loved only himself.” The ac­ count of the moment when he is literally taken possession of by 38 Antichrist is a stroke of dramatic genius. Immediately after this everyone is struck by his exalted appearance, and he writes with extraordinary ease and speed The Open Way to Peace and Prosperity. Here we have an example of how, as Steiner has pointed out, the force of evil can appear as an author. He is elected President of the United States of the World; then becomes Emperor. Acting on the basis of the three temptations, he gives the people economic security and as head of the church issues, in a miraculous manner, pardons of sin to all people. He unifies them under his rulership asking in return for these three “blessings” only that he be acknowledged as the supreme temporal and religious authority. He gives everything but freedom. Only a small group of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christians is able to see through these temptations and resist him. After external defeat and banishment they unite forces and finally in the desert, a union of all the Christian Churches (Soloviev’s great goal) is achieved. Antichrist is at last overthrown by the Jews and by a great natural catastrophe; whereupon the united Christians and the Jews are joined by the souls of all whom the Antichrist has executed, and all reign together with Christ. In The Brothers Karamazov, the coldly intellectual brother Ivan, Dostoevsky’s doubting, atheistic self, tells his brother Alyosha a story which to him is a devastating denial of Christianity; but to Alyosha and for Dostoevsky it is just the opposite. In the tale Christ appears after one of the auto da fe of the Inquisition. He moves among the crowd; and as a little coffin passes Him, at the request of the mother, He raises from the dead the little girl who lies there. At that moment the Grand Inquisitor appears, the people draw back in fear, and despite their gratitude to Christ they allow Him to be led away to prison. There at night, by candle light, the old Inquisitor visits Him. During the entire story Christ never once speaks. The Inquisitor tells Him how he now serves a great intelligence, the wise and dread Spirit, but always in Christ’s name. The dread Spirit is 39 the one who had the inconceivable genius to formulate the three temptations. He offered to Christ the power to turn stones into bread, to enslave men’s absolute belief in Him through performing a miracle, and to rule over the entire peaceful and prosperous earth: “a unanimous, harmonious, universal ant- heap.” Christ — says the Grand Inquisitor — has misjudged mankind. He thought men strong enough to come to Him out of their own activity, voluntarily and uncompelled. He loved only the few strong members of mankind. But he, the Grand Inquisitor, loves them all. He will not weigh them down with the terrible burden of free choice, but will take upon him­ self all men’s sins, make them happy, give them bread, and unite them all in peaceful harmony. Christ dare not come again and undo what he, the Grand Inquisitor, has done in His name. “Tomorrow I will burn Thee!” The Christ only gazes mildly upon him and then kisses him on his thin lips. The Inquisitor flings open the door of the prison calling out, “Go, and never return.” And the Christ steps out into the night. “And the old man?” asks Alyosha. “The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea,” are the last words of the tale. — And so the Grand Inquisitor becomes cursed with the split soul, the gap between heart and mind which afflicts so many of us today. In both stories the devil appears as a Great Intelligence of cosmic proportion, contemptuous of man as a weak and passive being. In both, men are offered happiness: bread, forgiveness of sins and “universal, harmonious unity” at the expense of active, responsible self-development. And in both, freedom appears as the price and purpose of withstanding the three temptations of the Great Intelligence. Again and again Soloviev stresses freedom: The purpose of universal history is that the bond between man and divinity become wholly conscious and free. Cosmic oneness must not weigh on the individual in a mechanical way nor as something organically determined. It must be morally offered up 40 by the individual as his own purpose, as his own good... . True unity is not posited from outside, but is reached by free effort, by the persistent and many-sided activity of mankind itself. Soloviev and Dostoevsky must also have spoken often together about Russia, about patriotism and nationalism. In his Morality, Legal Justice and Politics, Soloviev writes: A nation has a moral duty toward other nations and mankind as a whole ... Different nations are different organs in the body of humanity ... Nationalism in its extreme form ruins the nation that succumbs to it, making it the enemy of mankind ... In renouncing exclusive nationalism, a nation does not lose its independent life, but discovers its true, vital task. In 1880, in his Pushkin address, Dostoevsky kindled a “new spirit” in the Russian people when he told them that “to be a true Russian is to be the brother of all mankind.” These were his words and came from his heart with an artist’s eloquence to a body of people who acclaimed and loved him, but the thought was forged together with Soloviev. A few months later, Dostoevsky was dead. Thirty thousand people followed his body to the grave. Soloviev was one of those who spoke there. During the next years he wrote three essays in memory of Dostoevsky, calling him not only the great novelist, but the great prophet and Christian leader of Russia.

Part II will deal with Soloviev as poet-philosopher dur­ ing his later life and with his ideas on the Christian State.

41 From Christ Is Risen by Andrey Belyi

Russia, My country — You Are that Woman clothed with the sun To whom All eyes Are lifted. . . . I see clearly: Russia, My Russia, Is the God-bearer Overcoming The Serpent. . . . The peoples Inhabiting You Have stretched out Their hands through the smoke To Your spaces That are filled with song, Filled with the fire Of a descending seraph. And I, beholding, Feel my throat Lock with emotion. Translation by Babette Deutsch

Reprinted with permission of the translator. 42 Our Doctor

A Narration by GERHARD KLEIN

A person is often impelled to do something out of an inner compulsion without being able to explain to himself why this must be done. Thus I had to take the occasion of a trip to the South in order to go by a circuitous, difficult way to a remote village in the mountains. It is true that a letter I had received some time before, and which I shall mention later, did play a certain role in this decision. And thus I stood now, in the winter twilight, before the house which was to be the goal of my journey. I still hesitated to ring the bell and enter. The house was still there, in the midst of a snow-covered garden, ancient, comfortable-looking as before — familiar to me, like everything else round about, out of the time when I lived in strange circumstances in this village. There still, was the white door-plate with the word Doctor in antique, flowery letters. Only Doctor, just as on other houses one reads Police or Savings Bank. No name, as is otherwise customary. The person who lived there had been born in that house, as had his father before him. The plate had originated indeed with his grandfather. Everybody, the big and the little, simply knew that “our Doctor,” as he was always called, lived there. Throughout the whole journey I had been living in memories. During the time of the persecution, I had hidden out with a peasant of this village. I was able to help him with the business end of his widely extended farms, which were scattered about in this district. Through the combination of new methods and ancient peasant wisdom, he had been able to bring to life again the growing of grain and fruit which had formerly flourished in this region and had been given up in favor of cattle raising only. 43 His plants and seed of special sturdy winter kinds were in great demand. He said that his father had traveled in his little cart with his two oxen. He had been able to get possession of many unsuccessful farms. In the first World War he was for four years a prisoner of war in Russia. He had learned a great deal in this strange land. He and Our Doctor had been friends since childhood. Some time passed, however, before I became worthy to take part in their regular meetings. But there had been many opportunities for me to form a picture of this man. I often met him as he started out late in the evening on his snow shoes, his instrument bag on his back, in order to give service at a birth. Then I saw him in the summer in his small peasant car. It was known that women called for him from great distances. He was ready for everything; those in despair he stimulated, those who put on airs he ridiculed; he saw to it that everybody on the farm got into harness to give help. I learned, moreover, that he often sat for hours by the side of a dying person when the pastor, having ended his ceremony, had long gone away. They craved him. He sat by them, held their hand, often spoke a good word, such as: “You will soon have finished it; it is your last hard work here; after all, you have always done everything in an orderly manner.” Praying he never did; others could do that, providing this happened in a low enough voice. He was simply there. To the very end. A certain releasing influence emanated from him. On the other hand, it often happened that, if a patient died who might, as he thought, have been saved, no one could speak to him for days. At a later time, when I knew him better, he said once: “One is always called too late. The peasants cling to their money. For the most part I have to do with very old people or little children. Then I am really a veterinarian. The little ones cannot, and the old ones will not speak.” But he often appeared before he had been called. He knew a great deal through an inner capacity of presentiment. Since it meant much to me to be in touch with people, I often went to the tavern where the people sat together, some talk­ 44 ing politics, others playing cards. The Doctor never came there. Once as I was sitting there, all the loud talk suddenly ceased. I looked up and saw the mighty figure of Our Doctor standing in the door. Under his bushy eyebrows the gray eyes looked out with anger. A peasant fellow who liked to drink laid his cards down and ducked out by him to his wife who had given birth to a baby only a day or two before. Not a word was spoken. But later, I heard that when this man was a boy, the Doctor had once found him in the woods, moaning with a broken foot. He had put splints on the injured foot and carried the boy on his back the long distance to his home. Now came the moment when I was invited to be present while my peasant and Our Doctor were together. Is was then that I realised I did not even know his name. Nobody in the village called him by name. In introducing me, my peasant said: “He would like very much to know your name.” The Doctor gave an uproarious laugh and said: “You will not believe it, but I am really called Thomas Eisenbart,” and he immediately began to hum the song of Doctor Eisenbart, who treated people after his own fashion. This meeting took its course, like all others that followed it, according to a definite ritual. At first the two played chess together. Our Doctor decared to me that this was a good thing because a person must keep silent then and think, whereas otherwise there is mostly talk and no thinking along with it. I could sit there, look on in silence, if I felt so disposed, or take up something to look at. This differed according to where we were. If we were at the home of my peasant, he would entrust me with one of the portfolios of his precious collection. In other words, he was an enthusiastic collector of modern prints. This interest of his may have come about in the winter expanses of the Russian steppes where nature, as he said, made drawings in black and white. Indeed, I had the opportunity to become acquinted with many an exceptional drawing, engraving, carving and etching. The entire Gypsy series of Felix Mueller, as well as works of Kirchner, Heckel, Masereel, and many others were represented here. Precious things hung on those walls. 45 But not a single picture was there in Our Doctor’s room. He maintained that people never looked at what they hung on their walls. Instead, there were strange plants, precious minerals and crystals on display. From the ceiling hung unusual root forms. In a large aquarium fish were tumbling about. “They do not talk and yet they are alive,” he said of them. Besides all these, he laid out many things for me to look at. Most of all I was attracted by drawings called “Art Forms in Nature,” which Ernst Maeckel had seen through the microscope and drawn so painstakingly and artistically. Once he showed me with great enthusiasm something new. This was a book of pictures of crystallizations which had been modified characteristically through the addition of organic substance, the modifications coming about according to the nature of the substance added: agave sap, poppy sap, or even human blood. They differed even according to whether they had been made in the evening or the morning and could be clearly differentiated according to their peculiarities. Moreover, the effect of chemical fertilizer could be clearly recognised in a picture of potato sap. “There is something in this,” he said to me: “One gets a trace there of the living.” Thus I had occupation of my own as long as they were playing. There the two old men sat opposite to each other, each with a glass of wine at his side. Often when one of them thought he had made an unusually successful move, he drank to his opponent with a cunning smile. It occurred to me then to see what wonderfully fine, long-fingered hands Our Doctor had — surgeon’s hands or musician’s, I had to think. After the game ended came the conversation. The moment the word spirit was mentioned in the conversation, an incredulous look appeared on the Doctor’s face. To be sure he was a great admirer of Paracelsus; he admitted also that there was a great deal of wisdom concealed in old folk medicine. “I will not deny that something spiritual and essential is at work in the world, but I do not know anything about this. I do not like to talk about something that I have never experienced,” so he would say. He never ridiculed sacred things. 46 He never entered the church. That was something alien to him and unsuited to his nature. But he could listen well. Our conversations always entered into profound matters. At the end of the evening he played Beethoven in a masterly manner. Then his wife also came out and listened devotedly. He liked to give people nicknames; and so it came about that when my peasant had introduced me to him, he called me Fisher of Men. Our pastor, he called the Lord God’s Servant. But another pastor in a neighboring village he referred to as old Oil Bottle. He often drew me out in good natured play with: “Now, old Fisher of Men, why are you always running around with an empty net? Does it not soon become unpleasant to you?” It was necessary to be able to meet him on equal terms, and this he liked very much. So I sometimes answered: “There must be plenty of room in the net for you, my dear Doctor. After all, one of these days you will swim along in yourself!” Once I had to bring an injured workman to him to be bandaged. How astonished I was when he led me into a treatment chamber equipped with every modern arrangement and necessary apparatus. I had known him only with his wooden stethoscope. Indeed I had seen him even place his ear over the heart or the back of people to listen to them. I knew also only his small, simply-furnished consulting room. He noticed my surprise and said: “A person has to have this too. Many people have to see a little chromium in order to believe that one can help them. The old people and the timid come into the little parlor. For the most part I need the apparatus only to confirm what I myself have already observed. At first I look at the eyes or the hair; study the fingernails and much besides.” When I spoke about this to my peasant, he explained to me that Our Doctor was greatly respected in the outside world. He had published reports of a good deal of scientific research and corresponded with famous professors. Long ago he could have been a professor. But he wished to remain with us. All of this is known to no one here and he himself never mentions it. Only now and then a great automobile appears. Gentlemen with spectacles and learned faces get out of the car. Then follow 47 conferences lasting for hours. After all, there was a picture in the Doctor’s house. On his desk stood a photograph of his wife — one out of her girlhood, to be sure. And yet she had up to this time looked just the same. I had become acquainted with her only a short time before. She was like a silent lamp. Always ready, she was, to be on hand for him. Even when he came home covered with snow at night from a case of childbirth, she was on hand and took care of him. Her special devotion she gave to the garden with its flowers. What this delicate human being could accomplish was beyond belief. But she was all but extinguished when she came in contact with his absolute, matter-of-course expectation that everybody became as much involved in work as he required himself to be every day. His “force” was not sufficient for her. She had need of a warm cloak. And yet he must have loved her devotedly. Nor, as a matter of fact, was what he gave sufficient for his son, who was so utterly unlike his father — more like his mother with his delicate limbs, high forehead and fine features. I had seen him very seldom, but he must in some way have developed confidence in me; for soon after the death of his mother, he came to me as if by chance while I was in the fields. I was shocked by the expression of long brooding on his face. I greeted him and expressed my sympathy. At first he was silent for a long time. Then he began to speak quietly of his father. He blamed his father for the death of his mother. “Oh, the horrible assurance of his domination, his capacity for doing everything, his matter-of-factness about existence. All that is not enough for me. I want to know; but is it possible then really to know anything?” I let him express himself. He was studying philosophy and psychology and had entered into the Existen­ tialist Movement. We had a prolonged conversation. I could not help him very much, although it was clearly a good thing for him to relieve himself once of all he felt about his father. My peasant told me then how great an effort his father had made to share with his son his capacity for perception, his experience. But the son had barricaded himself against everything that came 48 from his father. He despised as unscientific and primitive what was only a form of modest discretion. And yet there was one realm in which father and son were reunited: they played music to­ gether — at first for the mother’s pleasure, and then in her memory. All of these remembrances had accompanied me on my journey. Both of these persons I had lost from my vision. A new period in my life had taken me far away. One day, however, an unusually long letter from my peasant arrived and once more brought me back into the little world of the village. After reporting many affairs of a narrower or wider circuit, and after the gratifying communication that he had been able to acquire for his collection some especially beautiful prints, he came to the point of speaking about our friend. He said he had in some way changed. Had become very mild. His son, the only human being belonging in a personal way to him, had fallen in the high mountains. We knew, indeed, that he had become through constant practice a good mountain climber. The rocky desolation exercised a magic spell upon him. But he was a lone walker. News had come that he was missing and that a vain search for him had after many days come to an end. All of them had been distressed as to how Our Doctor would stand this blow. For some days he was not to be seen. Then he had suddenly gone to the region of the accident. Next they learned from the newspapers that he had begged there for a renewal of the search. This was at first opposed as useless. But the Doctor, who had never before been in that district, had asserted such exact suggestions regarding a possible place where a search should be made, with all the characteristic specifications, that his wish was accepted and the unfortunate young man was actually found. He was buried in that mountain village. The Doctor was now going about his work as before. The difference was that he took part in every burial and often spent a long time at the cemetery. Moreover, the evening chess games had not been resumed. My peasant said that he himself was not feeling quite well. His work had been taken over by his sons. He would surely soon be taking the long journey. 49 Many pressing obligations had caused me to delay writing back to them both. Then some time later I read in the news­ paper a report that a hitherto scarcely known, comprehensive collection of modern graphic arts would be sold at auction. So my peasant had entered upon the long journey earlier than we had expected. His heirs, glad about the capital that the father had assembled, would now scatter his beloved prints to all the winds. I was sad of soul to think that I had neglected a reply to that letter. And this had something to do with the fact that I had journeyed here now and was standing before the door of this house. In me there lived a question: “What shall I find?” The old housekeeper, who had attended to everything even in the time of the Doctor’s wife, opened the door at my ring, recognized me, and led me in as if I had been there last only the day before. I entered the living room. There was Our Doctor sitting alone at the chess table, a glass of wine as usual at his side, playing with an invisible guest. He looked up happily, saying: “Good that you have come. Please, be patient for a minute or two.” He pointed to the chair upon which I had always sat previously. I saw that the game was coming speedily to an end. He continued to concentrate on his playing. I looked around me. Nothing had changed. Only on his desk there stood beside the picture of the mother a picture of the son. I became restless; something was different from before. Then I discovered a picture hanging on the wall. This was an event! It was a sketch by Rembrandt: one of those attempts of the great master to capture a motif which occupied him again and again: the disciples at Emmaus recognize the Master, Who is sitting with them at the table. It was that painting in which, between the astonished disciples, the figure of the Resurrected One lights up like a radiating bundle of lightning flashes, the whole deeply moving, indicated with a few strokes. The last move. The Doctor stood up, noticed my look directed at the picture, smiled a little and said again: “Yes, it is good that you have come. You will understand me. My dear Fisher of Men, there was a place left for me after all in your net.” 50 Then came a report. The news of the death of the son had shattered him. For a time the cleft between them had continued. He had never been able to understand him, but loved him greatly. Late one evening he had been seated at the table in a pondering mood in the light of a candle which he had lighted according to an ancient custom as a candle for the dead. Then someone had entered the chamber. He had scarcely looked up until the stranger said apologetically: “The door was open; I saw a light.” The voice streamed out unlimited peace. The countenance showed a bright clarity. “I am a friend of your son; I know him well,” the stranger remarked further. The fact that He did not say: I knew him well did not occur to the Doctor until later. He continued to sit in the half darkness at the table and a conversation began. Then there came a pause. “I do not know any longer what he said,” the Doctor continued. “Perhaps it was only a very few words. But the way in which he listened and asked questions enabled me to say what I had never said before — indeed, had hardly even thought. A deep trust drew me out. Many things within me came into order. Premonitions became certitude. All of my experiences and all of my knowledge were taken apart as I spoke and were put together again in a new way. Suddenly I understood the one who had died. He had ascended during his life. I was not prepared to follow him. I left him alone. Everything had to occur in this way. I called out: ‘Oh, if only I could help him!’ ‘But you can,’ came the answer from the guest. ‘Seek for him!’ He stood up. ‘Please remain seated; I shall find the way out as I found the way in.’ He disappeared without a sound. Had I been dreaming? No, the sound of his voice was still hovering in the room. I became perfectly still. Then I found my son. He told me many things, described to me exactly how the accident had happened, also showed me where his corpse lay. The mother was with him. I learned to understand her also and her death. That was not easy for me. Since then I can accompany him. He has asked me about many things which I must seek out in order to be able to communicate them to him. 51 “Other dead persons also come. Our friend, the peasant, is always turning the sheets in his collection, which the wind wishes to take away from him. To many of my former patients I have to make clear that they are dead and that they must go forward. What occurs at the grave and what is said there often fail to reach them. “My son must have been occupied with new thoughts during the last period of his life; on the night table in the guest house a book of Christian Morgenstern’s lay open. Two lines in this were underscored: This is the door through which I entered here, And all things seem now changed from what they were. The title reads: Reincarnation. I have tried to find out what that means. That also I had to discover. So much newness for a man so old as I am! This picture of Rembrandt’s was laid on my table by the advertising magazine of a pharmaceutical factory. It has helped me to understand what I have experienced.” Many conversations occupied the few days that I could stay. I accompanied him on his trips to the sick, greeted many an old acquaintance and the well-known landscape. When leaving, I knew that we would never see each other again on earth, but also why I had had to take this trip. — Translation by Olin D. Wannamaker

52 From The Path of the Poet ALBERT STEFFEN

Listen to what Natura says when a tiny seed is sown into Mother Earth. See, it sends little roots downward and germs upward. It spreads leaves and shoots up the stalk. It unfolds the blossom to lovely flower-face, and hardens the fruit to dry capsule. Then it rolls forth the seed. These are deeds which follow when Natura speaks. Her word passes through seed, germ, leaf, calyx and blossom in everlasting transformation, ever borne by the same force, as immortal principle. Let us go deep, to find the traces of the being of the primal plant, into the tiny roots which penetrate the earth realm. We arrive at a dark-filled network, the fibres pale. Here reigns the force which lives in growing and sprouting, not as light of the sun, but as shine of the moon. Do we not feel, when we experience the sub-earthly roots, as when we look up to Luna’s sickle-shell, sheltered as by a mother? In the stem, however, which firms itself, on which the leaves in spirals wind upward, Mercury works. Here he has modeled the Mercury rod. Hermes leads us upward into the loftier heaven unto Venus, who from the blossoms, manifoldly shines toward us. Manifold appears her countenance: fiery red like the rose, sombrely sad like the columbine, softly blueing like the forget-me-not. Fruits are gifts from Jupiter. Who sanctions the reign of wisdom, to him he grants the orb. Mars operates with sling-shot and catapult. Armored, in splints, spurred, he makes his entrance, and blasts the core. Last but not least, he still serves Saturn, who in warmth, preserves the germinal force in the seed. Such event is directed by the Sun. He it is who steers all the spirits of the planets. By his Light-commands, the heavenly orchestra comes into tune. It is a chorus which reaches from Earth to Heaven. — Translation by Daisy Aldan and Ili Hacklander 53 [Image: Drawing offamily]aplant54[Image:fromtheDrawingLabiatae The Labiatae* Plants of Warmth

WILHELM PELIKAN

With three thousand species, the Labiatae are very much a family of medicinal plants. Where another plant family may show this or that medicinal variation as something special and unusual among an abundance of species, every single one of the Labiatae is a medicinal plant. If the medicinal plant generally strikes us as a one-sided development of the family type, then the Labiatae as a family must be regarded as a particularly one-sided variation of archetypal plant nature. This one-sidedness is due to the extraordinary extent to which this plant family permits the cosmic forces of warmth to influence it. That is its essential nature. Warmth takes hold of the Labiatae and organizes their development to a far greater degree than any other plant family. Of course, other plant families, and in fact every plant family, do also have their share of the action of warmth, but none to the same extent as the Labiatae. The centre of the impulses for such warmth activity lies, as with all plants, outside the plant body, in the cosmos, in the sun. Only man, the being who has an ego, bears such an impulse-centre as part of his being, within himself; he is a being with his own warmth. A particular relation between man and the Labiatae arises through the warmth in the make-up of those plants.

* Continued from foregoing issues of the Journal. Translation from the German of the author’s Heilpflanzenkunde (Medical Botany); published with the kind permission of the author and of the publishers, Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag am Goetheanum/Dornach, Switz­ erland. Translator: R. E. K. Meuss, F.I.L. 55 This warmth-element finds physical expression in the production of special, fiery, aromatic substances, etheric oils. These are substances which may be said to want to become warmth themselves. In them, warmth has taken substance, as far as this is possible, towards its own essential nature. These substances are extremely volatile, with rapid expansion from the fluid to the gaseous state, easily inflammable, and burning with a bright flame. The vapour is invisible and colourless, it allows light to pass through it, but at the same time robs it of radiant heat, letting the light emerge bright but cool. This is called adiathermancy by the physicists. The etheric oils have no relation to the watery element, nor to the earth. They do not dissolve in water, nor do they dissolve minerals or salts. They do dissolve substances which also owe their existence to the action of warmth, waxes, resins, fats. The etheric oils contain a great amount of hydrogen; etheric oil of rosemary, for instance, is the plant substance containing the most hydrogen; and hydrogen is the substance most closely related to warmth in the whole earth sphere. Cosmic warmth-activity is differentiated into different tem­ perature zones over the earth; parallel to this differentiation the various species of Labiatae develop from the main type. This type unfolds its possibilities parallel to those differentiations in warmth activity as follows: The Labiatae prefer the Mediterranean, avoid the tropical jungle, and in fact the tropics altogether, but also the cold regions. They love wide, open fields, dry—even stony—slopes, wild scrub land, sunny hill types. Here they develop their most characteristic and noble species. Lesser varieties are found in damp meadows, near brooks, in the shade of woods; these species have rough, coarse, sweat-like scents. One can smell how the element of warmth does not gain ascendency as it does in the purer species, but must fight against the obstructive forces of damp and darkness. In the tropics, the cosmic sphere, and particularly cosmic warmth, is drawn too strongly into the earthly sphere; this is not the place for the Labiatae. In the colder regions, the cosmic forces do not get hold of the earth 56 strongly enough, and here, too, the Labiatae are absent. In the mountain regions of the Mediterranean, with their short rainy periods in spring, the long, dry, bright summers, where cosmic forces continue to rule for a long time, the type develops to its greatest perfection. Here grow the noblest, the wonderfully aromatic species of lavender, rosemary, thyme, sage and others. With regard to warmth activity, therefore, the Labiatae prefer the middle one of the climatic zones, the rhythmic middle of the earth body; and out of this warmth activity they develop their etheric oils, preferably in their own rhythmic region, in the leaf region. Having visualized the distribution of the Labiatae over the climatic zones of the earth, we must next picture the distribution of their life cycles within the cycle of the seasons. They are above all summer-flowering. The root process of the labiate plant comes to grips with the mineral element in the soil. It does not like the half-mineral, half-living consistency of swamp soil, nor does it take hold on a living substrate as the parasite does. But nevertheless this root process does not really make the mineral nature of the earth part of itself. That which we might term “turned-up earth,” namely a tree, develops only as a rare exception among the Labiatae. For them, it is enough to have enlivened the mineral; and the plant then immediately strives towards the opposite pole. A watery congestion of growth, like that seen in the succulent plants, is equally foreign to the Labiatae. A simple pair of cotyledons is followed by the other leaves of the shoot; no trouble is taken to form or arrange them with loving care; simple, undivided and decussate, further leaves follow. In the “normal” plant, say a Ranunculus, the single pair of cotyledons is followed by the rising spiral of alternate leaves, showing a rich variety of forms, and only in the end again contracted into a simple leaf, the little sepal in the circle of the calyx, similar to the early form and leading to the higher beginning of floral development. This whole range of leaf development is limited to very simple forms in the labiate plant —evidence of a strong, rapid striving towards the flowering process. The leaves, the 57 stems, already begin to give off fragrance; in this, too, they anticipate the flowering process, are already warmed through and inflamed like flowers, whilst a “normal” plant first mercurially weaves the airy light element into those of water and earth. To this “mercurial” process belonging to the leaf, a “sulphuric” and “phosphoric” are added in the Labiatae. In the circumstances it will be no surprise that the form of the calyx already resembles that of the corolla. If a sage blossom is plucked from its calyx, it will be seen that the latter has the same form as the flower. The flowers themselves appear in such abundance, in such a great variety of peculiar forms and strange conformations, that they obviously are a key to the essential nature of the labiate plants. The axis of the flower changes from the vertical direction of the shoot to the horizontal, and with this the labiate flower moves away from plant nature, towards animal nature. For the horizontal is the direction of formation and movement of the animal. Upper lips arch up, lower lips are pushed outwards; throats and gullets open up, forms to match the insect linked with these flowers. If blossoms like that are filled with wax, the impression resembles the head of a bee with its proboscis extended. Stamens and stigma become organs moved by a touch. The insect flying to the flower is received, enveloped, its movement even elicits a movement in response, like an echoed movement. The juices of the plant also surge towards the animal, in the formation of nectar; this is all the more abundant the more often the flower is visited. If a bee visits thyme, sage or other labiates, this is an encounter between warmth-animal and warmth-plant. The animal maintains a temperature level similar to that of the human blood in its hive. It gathers the sugary warmth-spiced nectar to transform it into honey, raising it to a higher sphere of life, that of the animal, permeated with warmth. The Labiatae are one of the great families of bee-plants, therefore. Their plant processes reach out towards bee nature as nothing else in the plant world does. Names like bee-nettle and Melittis (Greek for bee) express these relations. The warmth- plant and the warmth-animal determine and demand each other. The astral sphere which takes hold of the Labiatae from the 58 animal side, completing them, proves to be particularly permeated with warmth. The fruits arising from such a flowering process are dry little nuts containing seeds with a high fat or oil content. These, too, are very much saturated with warmth. (Volatile and fatty oils are related through their connection with warmth, but are at the same time also polar opposites. In volatile oils, substance separates out into the warmth element, a centrifugal process. In fatty oils, substance absorbs the warmth element, a centripetal process. In volatile oils, material substance strives towards the sphere of warmth; in fatty oils, warmth moves into the substance. Volatility is the essence of the one, envelopment, concentration, that of the other.) Juicy fruits produced by the watery element are lacking. Having looked at the labiate life as a whole, let us return once more to the formation of the leaves. It strikes one that the meagre amount of play permitted in the shaping out of the labiate leaf — from the broad leaf of melissa or wound-wort to the needle-like leaf of rosemary or thyme — faithfully reflects the extent to which cosmic warmth actually takes hold of the species. And this is also reflected in the taste of the leaf, from the mildly aromatic one of melissa to the fiery, peppery taste of summer savory and thyme with their narrow leaves, and finally the burning, caustic flavour of the small leaf of Teucrium marum.

AREAS FOR THE THERAPEUTIC ACTIVITY OF THE LABIATAE As flowering is so strong in this family, being pushed right down into the leaf region, one may expect stimulating and warming activity, firing the metabolism, anywhere between metabolism and rhythmic system. And the sphere of action of the Labiatae does indeed cover an area from digestion to respiration. The processes of warmth and the intensive sugar process (the formation of nectar) establish a relation to the member of man’s being which is active in processes of warmth, basing itself on the sugar process in the blood; the ego. The activity of the ego, in the metabolism, in the formation of the blood and in the 59 respiratory processes, is quite generally influenced by medicinal plants from among the Labiatae. These plants do not intensively concern themselves with the mineral, earth element, and because of this their medicinal action also does not noticeably extend to the system of nerves and senses. Nor do powerful astral impulses press in to any abnormal extent anywhere in the Labiatae, breaking through the region of the formative forces, the etheric, right into the physical sphere (this is characteristic of the formation of alkaloids in poisonous plants). As a result the Labiatae also do not have any particularly immediate effect on man’s astrality, such as narcotic, anaethestic actions, dimming consciousness. The accent is on the activity of the ego organization in the metabolic sphere, with an inclination towards the rhythmic system. Depending on the specific form developed by the individual species of this family, this or that organic sphere will be specifically addressed; either the blood, or the gastro-intestinal region, the heart, the lung, the uterus. Over and above this, the Labiatae will assist quite generally in controlling any unrestrained astral activity, and place the astral body under the rule of the ego. Weakness of the ego in many different forms can be treated with these plants, right down to that organic failure of the ego organization resulting in diabetes mellitus. In the form of herbs and spices, too — this family includes a great many herbs — the Labiatae stimulate the ego to conscious participation in the processes of digestion, by making it aware of taste, of savour. The scents of the family all have that stimulating, awakening, harsh and fiery note which strengthens the ego. There is nothing sweet, cloying, indulgent or benumbing about them. THE MOST IMPORTANT MEDICINAL PLANTS OF THE FAMILY As the Labiatae get their key-note from the element of warmth, let us first of all consider the most typical species, those where the warmth-principle is fully dominant. These are headed by rosemary. They are followed by those where the element of warmth has to assert itself by fighting against opposing formative principles, or where it is muted. 60 WHERE THE WASTELAND ENDS: POLITICS AND TRAN­ SCENDENCE IN POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY by Theodore Roszak, 492 pp. Doubleday and Co., 1972, $10.00

Theodore Roszak is best known for his widely read volume, The Making of a Counter Culture, in which he argues that the disaffection and alienation of contemporary youth reflect a rejection of the conventional scientific world view and a longing for deeper, life-enhancing values by which they can lead meaningful and productive lives. Where the Wasteland Ends is a further development of several of the themes of the earlier book, and the volume is no less remarkable for the debt it owes, perhaps more than the author would himself admit, to Rudolf Steiner. In the introduction, Roszak asks the following, “What, afterall, is the ecological crisis that now captures so much belated attention but the inevitable extroversion of a blighted psyche? Like inside, like outside. In the eleventh hour, the very physical environment suddenly looms up before us as the outward mirror of our inner condition, for many the first discernible symptoms of the disease within.” (pp.xxii-xxiii) The aims of the book comprise nothing less than diagnosis of the “disease within,” characterization of its origins and effects on modern life, and, finally, a suggested path for the renascence of modern culture. One of the root causes of the ills of modern man, says Mr. Roszak, is modern science itself: the worldview put forth by science; the detachment of sensibility accompanying scientific inquiry; the notion that scientific objectivity is the only valid measure of reality. The message of science is that “man is alone in the Universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance ... This central concept of modern biology is no longer a hypothesis among others, possible or at least conceivable. It is today the sole hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact.” (WTWE, p. 271, quoted from J. Monod, Chance and Necessity). Convinced by scientific 61 rationalism that objective consciousness is the single means of gaining access to truth, modern man doubts the existence of anything which can not be weighed, measured, quantified. What, then, of the human spirit? “The scientific ‘act of knowing’ ... is an act of alienation. ... Far more directly than it encouraged callous behavior, this ennobling of the alienated psyche has progressively degraded every form of awareness human beings possess. It has sapped our ability to defend the claims of the sacred in ourselves, our fellows, and our environment against the knife edge of objectivity (WTWE, p. 173).” As Roszak shows, the principle of objectivity represents the ruling paradigm for other spheres of modern thought, all of which derive their standard of intellectual respectability from natural science. Bereft of true self-knowledge, modern man consumes, despoils, overpopulates, and stands on the brink of self-annihila­ tion; the insane rush to consume, acquire and manipulate is but a symptom of the void within. The only solution, says the author, is a new epistemology which recognizes other paths to truth; one which begins to approach and validate the sacred in man and nature; one which restores meaning, purpose, and dignity to human existence. Roszak’s religion is not one of doctrine or of belief; it is based rather upon his acceptance of the existence of transcendental knowledge, arrived at by faculties of cognition other than analytical intellect. For the author, the sacramental vision of the “old Gnosis” is equally valid as a way of knowing, and it is the loss of this which has led to the desperate plight of modern man. “It goes by many names. St. Bonaventura called it ‘the journey of the mind to God’; the Buddha called it the eight-fold path; Lao Tzu called it ‘finding the Way’. The way back. To the source from which the adventure of human culture takes its beginning. It is this progress which the good society exists to facilitate for its members (WTWE p. 464).” In support of his contentions concerning higher cognition, Roszak devotes a section of the book to Blake, Wordsworth, and Goethe, as three individuals who, possessed of “visionary power,” embodied in their artistic and poetic work their 62 experience of the reality beyond. Roszak firmly subscribes to an evolution of consciousness from an earlier “participating” consciousness to the alienated “single vision” of modern science; a considerable portion of the book is devoted to an analysis of the historical and cultural transformations which have brought about the “spectator consciousness” of modern man. The author has been greatly influenced by his careful reading of ’ Man or Matter, Charles Davy’s Towards a Third Culture, ’s Saving the Appearances, and Rudolf Steiner’s Goethe the Scientist. Roszak is convinced that solutions to the problems of modern times will not come from within the context of the scientific, technocratic culture itself. “Science-based industrialism must be disciplined if it is to be made spiritually, even physically livable. There must be a drastic scaling down and decentralizing. Of course we must be selective in our winnowing out of the industrial experiment. But selection requires a criterion of judgment. And here, the issue lies between those who believe that the culture of science can somehow generate its own principle of life-enhancing selection (the ideal of secular humanism) ... and those (like myself) who believe that hope is bound to finish a despairing vanity. The only standard of selection that will apply in these matters must grow from a living realization of what human destiny is. Perhaps no single mind, no single culture can grasp that destiny whole. But of this much I feel certain; that such a realization lies on a plane of experience which mainstream science does not embrace, cannot embrace without turning back on its own distinctive commit­ ment. Alienation means being sundered from that dimension of life (WTWE pp. xxi-xxxii).” Roszak does not offer a formula or blueprint for the renewal of our culture; his main point is, I think, a plea for spiritual knowledge, and it is here that a receptive reader, who fully subscribed to the contentions of the book, would probably be left with a series of unanswered questions. Does the author feel that modern man can attain spiritual knowledge, if in­ deed he holds that “sacramental vision” can be consciously and 63 deliberately developed? If so, how? What is the path of knowledge suitable for modern times? Finally and most importantly, in what way does the higher knowledge to which Roszak alludes have the capacity to bring solutions to the myriad problems in all sectors of modern life? Is sacramental vision only a form of “seeing” or is it also a way of knowing, comprehending, and actively creating? Where the Wasteland Ends is a significant and compelling book. For some it will represent an introduction to a genuine search for higher knowledge. In addition, it serves as a real alternative to a great deal of the faddish and ill-advised dabblings in the occult which currently abound, for here is a carefully researched, brilliantly argued and highly convincing case, written by an obviously earnest and intelligent author. I sincerely hope it receives the attention which it justly deserves. George K. Russell

THE SECRETS OF METALS by Wilhelm Pelikan; ix + 179 pages. Second edition, translated from the German by Charlotte Lebensart. Copyright by Anthroposophic Press, Inc., 1973.

After all, we seek in vain to express the essence of a thing. All things are known to us through their effects; and a full history of all these effects for a particular object might, ultimately, comprise the essence of that object. It doesn’t help much to describe a man’s character. Relate, instead, the man’s deeds and actions, his behavior under varying circumstances, and his char­ acter will unfold before our eyes. — From Goethe’s foreword to his “Outline of a Theory of Colors,” 1810. This is one key to Wilhelm Pelikan’s approach to his subject in the book The Secrets of Metals. The author — trained as an engineer and with many years of experience in the realms of 64 chemistry and pharmacology — brings to light the nature of twelve metals by parading them, as it were, in all their multifarious presence and behavior on the world’s stage, in space and in time. “Parading” may be a word of ambiguous meaning for the reviewer’s purpose. Well chosen, for it implies a striking presentation, a rich and colorful pageant of many details, facts, qualities, activities, relationships, uses, effects, etc. pertaining to each metal. Ill chosen, for it also implies a possibly weighted selection of facts for a particular purpose. Herein lies a crucial point. All intelligent presentation must involve a selecting and ordering of its ingredients. To make the order so comprehensive, significant and genuine that the unfalsified nature of the object presented emerges from it — that is the task of the (Goethean) scientist. A difficult task, whether the object be man or metal. For metals, Pelikan has taken a first, long stride forward towards its fulfilment. The main text of the book opens with two preparatory chapters. The first, “The Metallic Condition on Earth,” introduces us to the earth presence of metals, first in a simple, perceptual meeting: “The metals are lustrous, polished, durable, flexible yet solid, and impress us with their weight; we feel they have significance and dignity”; then, in a widening circle of acquaintance, with their ubiquity: “Searching with the refined methods of the modern chemist, we really find all the metals present everywhere” — either in ponderable quantities or in minute, homeopathic proportion: in rocks, salts, water, air, “sunlight”; in plants, animals, and man. We are made aware that each metal has its “peculiar distribution” over the earth and in our bodily organization: materially or massively, as in ore deposits and in our bones; or “dynamically,” as in the minute and indispensible presence of trace iron in our blood. Particular metals relate dynamically to particular organs; and this opens the door to a study of their use for healing, in medicine. A quick review of the mode of existence of the metals on earth, from the precious and semi-precious to the common and the alkaline, leads the author to the striking affirmation that “the metallic quality is, fundamentally, a stranger on earth.” And the reader’s thoughts are thus directed to the considerations of the 65 next chapter, “Cosmic Aspects of the Metallic Nature.” This second chapter amplifies a perspective into the relationships between the cosmos and life on earth which “our century seems to be slowly rediscovering” (cf. research into cosmic rays, influence of the moon on life-rhythms, meteoric studies, etc.). Pelikan adduces known data, so ordered and related as to reveal a suggestive harmony between old knowledge and modern research. For instance: the metals iron, copper, silver, tin, gold, mercury and lead, which the ancients associated with Mars, Venus, Moon, Jupiter, Sun, Mercury and Saturn respectively, exhibit atomic weights of increasing magnitude in the order given. If these seven metals are placed in this order about a circle (see diagram), the resulting heptagon, with its several diagonals, exhibits numerous notable relationships of the metals — to one another (affinities and polarities “which are lost in the usual arrangement of the periodic system”); to life processes in plant, animal and man; to the space structure of our solar system; and to time se­ quences (days of the week). Relevant details are adduced from the fields of metallurgy, physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine, including L. Kolisko’s and Th. Schwenk’s investigations of the influence of sun and planets on col­ loidal-chemical changes. All this is an indicative, rather than conclusive manner; and as a general setting for the more comprehensive, concrete treatment of individual metals in the chapters that follow. The author’s plan for this treatment is best described in his own words: “... To begin with, we will describe each metal in its relationship to the earth, and its location, important ores, distribution over the earth. Then we will look at the pure metal itself. What it means for the plant world and for the animal nature will follow. Lastly, we will try to show itsactivity in man. Glimpses of its role in civilization will be included ... Sketches of the inner nature of the metals are ventured here. [Image: Circle of elements (clockwise fromtop)-Au197.2,Hg200.6,elements(clockwiseCircleof[Image:Pb207.2,Fe55.9,Cu63.5,Ag107.9,Sn118.7]66 The author knows they are imperfect, but believes that an effort in this direction will link us more profoundly with the essence of the metallic ...” The author’s aims go further. He extends his perspective beyond the physical and the biological into realms of soul and spirit, as “when we discover, for example, how lead is connected with impulses of consciousness, iron with those of courage, etc. For the mysteries of nature always find their highest forms in man.” A second key to Pelikan’s approach, essential for the understanding and evaluation of his work, lies in his conscious and pervasive use of data furnished by Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual-scientific investigations. “From the time of Goethe,” says the author, “there linger some hints that in the extra-human, in the realms and beings of nature, we can find milestones we have left behind on our way to becoming man. In our days, for the first time, this has been expounded by Rudolf Steiner in a way suited to modern consciousness.” In chapter IV, which deals with gold, the reader is given a succinct description of part of the development of the solar organism in the light of these investigations. That life was in the beginning, not death, may sound like a poetic sentiment which the modern intellect will benevolently allow for subjective edification. Yet a moment of intensive thought should indicate that death can as little engender life out of itself, as a salt or sediment, out of itself, can engender the solvent out of which it precipitated. It should not be difficult to find plausible the author’s statement that: “The substances we are familiar with today are only the petrified corpses of certain dynamic forces. Their original nature is living function. Matter is only their end.” Take this as a key-hole which opens up into a world-wide vista of supersensible reality amenable to responsible, daylight investigation (which is, indeed, a postulate of anthroposophy), and the large array of data which the author presents about the metals speaks to us in a fulness of meaning with combines their manifold role on earth (technological, biological, anthropological, medicinal, etc.) with their outreach into cosmic origins and processes. It is a rich, composite, panoramic picture which emerges for each metal in the subsequent chapters as the author details its 67 many properties and modes of behavior in different contexts. The seven metals previously referred to make up the larger portion of the book. Five more (zinc, aluminum, nickel, cobalt and antimony) were added in the second edition and are treated less extensively, but within the framework already described. Pelikan writes of his intent: “There will be no tracing of effects to causes, but from the diversity confronting our senses* we will ascend to the essence (of each metal), which at first emerges as image.” To what extent he has achieved this evocation of “essence through image” must depend, to some extent, on the power of the reader (to embrace details and make them cohere) as well as on that of the author (to present detail in focal, or multi-focal, coherence). For this reviewer — who does not come to the book as an expert (his profession is the teaching of mathematics) — the abundance of detail presented under each metal does not always easily focus into an image of essence — certainly not without re-reading and re-viewing the panorama with active effort! This is probably as it should be. For a mere intellectual understanding of content is only one step towards grasping, and above all towards experiencing the dynamic, primary, central sources of reality (“essences,” or “essential phenomena”) which illuminate and inform all the rest. In any case, the author’s book, which is not directed to the specialists (metallurgist, physician, chemist, etc.), yet speaks to them all, and to us all — opening up new vistas and meanings and applications to be further tested and extended in times to come. It is a forerunner of future and fuller efforts to read the script of nature and to unite the practicality of earth use with the reality of cosmic origins and the wholeness of man. Teachers, particularly of science, should find the book of special value. Amos Franceschelli

*Thus the reader will not expect reference to such aspects as atomic and sub-atomic structure in this study. This omission is deliberate and is demanded by the nature of the author’s approach. 68 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE ALAN HOWARD — Teacher, lecturer, author. Taught for many years in English state schools and at Michael House, Ilkeston; advisor to Toronto Waldorf School; lecturer-consultant to the Anthroposophical Society in the U.S. and Canada. ■■ THEODOR SCHWENK — Degree in mechanical and hydraulic engineering; worked many years in Aerodynamic Institute, Gottingen. Founder and Director of Institut fuer Stroemungswissenschaften, Herrischreid, Germany. Author: Sensitive Chaos, Rudolf Steiner Press, London; Bewegungsformen des Wassers and Grundlagen der Potenzfor­ schung, Verlag Freies Geistesleben, . ■■ ERWIN PHILLIPS — Former engineer at the Technische Hochschule in ; member of the General Anthroposophical Society since 1930; occasional lecturer on the Threefold Social Order. ■■ CHRISTY MACKAYE BARNES - Teacher in the Rudolf Steiner School, New York City; author Wind-in-the-Grass, Harpers, 1931; editor Journeyman’s Almanac; Albert Steffen, Translation and Tribute, Adonis Press, New York City. ■■ GERHARD KLEIN — Author Schicksal zu Gast; Founder Christian Community in Munich; Priest there till forbidden by Nazis, later in Hanover and Nuremberg; now retired but still active. ■■ ALMA GRAHAM JENKS — Charter member and President of the Toledo Branch, Ohio Poetry Society. ■■ ANDREY BELYI (1880-1934) - Russian symbolist poet. ■■ GEORGE RUSSELL — Associate Professor of Biology, Adelphi University, Garden City, N.Y. ■ ■ AMOS FRANCESCHELLI — Mathematician, teacher in the Rudolf Steiner School, New York City. ■■ WILHELM PELIKAN — Botanist and pharmacognocist, author Heilpflanzenkunde, Philosophisch—Anthro­ posophischer Verlag am Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland; The Secrets of Metals, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, N.Y.

The Journal for Anthroposophy is published twice a year by the Anthroposophical Society of America. Editor, Henry Barnes. Subscription $2.00 per year. Back numbers may be obtained upon request from Journal for Anthroposophy, 211 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Title design by Walter Roggenkamp. © by Journal for Anthroposophy, Number 18, Autumn, 1973.