The Shaping of the Human Form out of Cosmic and Earthly Forces
...on the other hand these things can have a decisive influence on our feeling and perceiving. Out of this wisdom there arises a feeling for the divine. It is only a knowledge that keeps to the surface of things which can be irreligious, not a knowledge that goes into them deeply. If we look once more at man's connection with the Cosmos, in the starry heavens above all we see beauty as an expression of spiritual entity, and then we become able to imprint the beauty of things on our art. Then in art there will not be merely external nature as seen by the senses, but with this deeply penetrating knowledge we shall in fact reach what Spiritual Science is. And we shall then appreciate something I said in the introductory lecture to this courseâhow here at the Goetheanum the unity of science, art and religion is sought. What is said by the one from whom the Goetheanum has its name?
He who has art and science too
Will never lack religion;
But he who does not have them both
Then let him have religion!
That means: Let him have the religion that comes from without; but anyone who possesses the essentials of science and art has religion from withinâthat is Goethe's conviction.
He who has art and science too
Will never lack religionâ
hence those who are striving, in the way referred to, for the unity of religion, art and science, do well to call their Building the âGoetheanumâ. But to comprehend what has arisen here on this foundation is apparently no task for the superficiality of the age, which looks condescendingly on everything and merely nibbles at one thing after another. Spiritual Science calls for decisionsâfor decisions that are necessary because the spirit of this science has the will to penetrate into the depths of the world. This must be grasped, too, out of the depths of the human heart.
The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.
(Franz Kafka)
âAmong the Greeks the answer of the Delphic Apollo is well known: âMan, know yourself.â So also Solomon, or rather Christ, says in the Canticle, âIf you do not know yourself, go forthâ.â
~ William of Saint-Thierry, De anima, Prologue, 1.105 ~
'Writing should facilitate sapientia rather than mere scientia... '
"Meanwhile, I had fully immersed my soul in the study of verse-making. Consequently I left aside all the seriousness of sacred Scripture for this vain and ludicrous activity. Sustained by my folly I had reached a point where I was competing with Ovid and the pastoral poets and striving to achieve an amorous charm in my way of arranging images and in well-crafted letters. Forgetting the proper rigor of the monastic calling and castingaway its modesty, my mind became so enraptured by the seductions of this contagious influence⦠that I began to use a few slightly obscene words and to compose little poems entirely bereft of any sense of weight and measure, indeed shorn of all decency."
Monodiae, 1.17
~ Guibert of Nogent (c.1055â1124) ~
The Abbey Library of St Gallen, Switzerland; the monastery was founded in 719.
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
âRepublics never survive, for their people do not like freedom but prefer to be led and guided and flattered and seduced into slavery by a benevolent, or not so, benevolent despot. They want to worship Caesar. So, American republicanism will inevitably die and become a democracy, and then decline, as Aristotle said into a despotism.â
âIt is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. Not ever, in the long history of the world. We are now on the edge of the abyss. Can we, for the first time in history, turn back? It is up to you."
âMankind adores its betrayers, and murders its saviors.â
âRepublics never survive, for their people do not like freedom but prefer to be led and guided and flattered and seduced into slavery by a benevolent, or not so, benevolent despot. They want to worship Caesar. So, American republicanism will inevitably die and become a democracy, and then decline, as Aristotle said into a despotism.â
âIt is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. Not ever, in the long history of the world. We are now on the edge of the abyss. Can we, for the first time in history, turn back? It is up to you."
âMankind adores its betrayers, and murders its saviors.â
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war. ~ Adam Smith
Hear!
(..and we all have known this.. from the start.)
