GA 325: European Spiritual Life in the 19th Century

Themes and Structure

The cycle opens on the nineteenth century, notes the change that came over its intellectual life around the middle of the century, and then reaches back for the cause. Steiner sets two representative figures side by side: Augustine, formed entirely by the late classical culture of the south-west, and Wulfila, the Gothic translator of the Bible, who stands for a stream that came out of the east and never passed through Rome. Nearly everything that follows is a working out of what happened when those two currents met.

The eastern stream is described first. Before the migrations, these peoples had a religious life bound to ancestry and to blood relationship, and the inner experience that carried it was closer to dream than to argument. Their priests were interpreters: a man reported what had risen in him, and the priest read it. Then the tribes settled, and Steiner locates a decisive shift in that settling. Religious perception loses its time character and takes on a spatial one. Interpretation moves outward, to the fall of light in a particular waterfall, the drift of cloud in a particular valley, the pattern made by cast twigs. In Steiner's compressed formulation, Religion underwent a metamorphosis into a religion of space. Living experience passes over into sign, symbol and rite.

The southern stream had made that passage long before, which is why the settled tribes became receptive to a Church that had been a state church since the fourth century. Here Steiner reads the doctrinal quarrels of the period as social facts rather than as debating points. Arian Christianity mattered, on his account, less for its formula about the Son than for the kind of soul life it travelled in, still warm, still near to the ancestral and dreamlike. Against it, Augustine's campaigns against Donatism and against Pelagius settle a different question: whether a person's relation to sin and to the spiritual world can begin in the person. When that is answered in the negative, the Church becomes an external ordinance, and what the institution administers counts for more than what stirs in the individual.

The next movement follows the consequence through a thousand years. Doctrine and learning are carried in Latin, a tongue that passes over the heads of the population, so that Christianity is in a real sense kept secret from the people it is preached to, and only the outward rite reaches them. Underneath, the villages develop a spiritual life of their own out of premonition, saga and the signs of the place. Trade with the east feeds that undergrowth with a late, decayed oriental wisdom, which sets into popular alchemy, astrology and fortune telling, and later gives figures such as Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme their strange vocabulary.

Then the towns. People come in from the countryside carrying an inner life formed by nature, and lose contact with nature itself. Their thinking begins to run in abstract forms, and it meets the older ecclesiastical abstraction of Latin on its own ground. Steiner puts the first stirrings of intelligence in the towns of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries and points to Dante as one visible instance of the popular element breaking upward into learned culture.

The last movement brings the argument home. Around the fifteenth century, thinking is born as an activity the human being performs, but it is born empty, carrying no content of its own, so it must fill itself from outside. That is exactly the equipment natural science needs, and four centuries of conquest follow. At the same time Roman law, in its Latin dress, joins with the rising princes, absorbs the towns and builds the modern state. By the middle of the nineteenth century the bill arrives: a thinking excellent for the sense world and useless for anything above it, and therefore a faith severed from knowledge and living on old tradition. Art tells the same story, and Goethe appears near the close as a figure who refused the division.