Europe Between East and West (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

IT is not only military men who know and say that the best-laid plans do not survive contact with the enemy—that war is unpredictable and one never knows where it will lead and what will come out of it. Many people in the two decades before the outbreak of what was soon called the ‘Great War’ in 1914 never imagined that Europe, in the ‘progressive’, new twentieth century would fall into a terrible, pan-European war catastrophe as had been the case in the Napoleonic era. Europe was now far too advanced for that, they said; its economies were too interdependent, its values no longer so primitive. The shock was therefore all the greater when the assassin’s bullets fired in an obscure Balkan town in June 1914 resulted not only in just such a European war catastrophe only 34 days later, but a conflict that spanned the world. A few, more insightful people had seen the disaster looming, however. Rudolf Steiner had been one of them, although he had still hoped that it might yet be avoided. In Vienna in the spring of 1914, he had given lectures1 in which he spoke about ‘the cultural carcinoma’ that had developed in European society over recent centuries, a disease rooted in materialism, and which had resulted, amongst other things, from overproduction in capitalist economies, their consequent need for cheap labour, and hence the poisonous class conflicts that were so violent and tense throughout Europe on the eve of the Great War.

A major factor in these class conflicts was the bourgeois comfort in which the middle classes lived, insulated from the suffering of the workers and farmers. This lack of interest and concern for the lives of others is a major feature of the lectures in the present volume. A terrible result of this ‘cultural carcinoma’ was the Communism which, in the crisis of the war, seized upon Russia from late 1917 and then overshadowed Europe and the world for the next 72 years. In 1910 in Oslo (then Christiania), Steiner had given a cycle of lectures in which he had spoken about the urgent need for Europeans to understand the archangelic spiritual forces (Folk Spirits) that guided, shaped and informed their cultures, and to see how these mighty beings were related to each other in the ways that tribes, nations and races emerged, flourished and faded in history. War, then and now, has been one of the worst consequences when such understanding has been absent. Fascism and Nazism were both consequences of the Great War of 1914-1918.

Many people were also shocked by the conflict that broke out—or rather, suddenly expanded—in February 2022. As in 1914, they too had not seen it coming or else had felt that such a conflict was not possible in our advanced European civilization of the twenty-first century, interlinked by all its telecoms and AI technology, its smart-phone-connected younger generation. The mass media have tended not to show pictures of the old red Soviet flags flying on some Russian tanks fighting in the Donbass or the swastikas and other Third Reich imagery openly displayed on some tanks and uniforms of the soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. As we have seen so many times since ‘the end of the Cold War’ in 1989-1991, the shadows of the consequences of the Great War of 1914-1918 have been long indeed. Today, we are being told by European politicians that we are no longer in a postwar era (i.e. post-World War II or post-Cold War) but have entered a ‘pre-war’ era (analogous to the 1930s) and must prepare accordingly for war with nuclear-armed Russia.2 The propaganda of 1914 and 1939 is being reheated. The only thing that can stem another catastrophe, says Rudolf Steiner in these twelve lectures, is consciousness, awareness, real insight into what is going on in our world, and that must include insight into the forces of the spiritual world which are reflected in and by current events. To develop this insight, Steiner urges, we must expand our active interest in contemporary events along with our understanding of spiritual-scientific principles.

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The twelve lectures in this book were originally all given by Rudolf Steiner to members of the Anthroposophical Society in the city of Munich, the capital of Bavaria, southern Germany, on eight visits to that city during the First World War, 1914-1918. The overall German title given to the lectures was Mitteleuropa Zwischen Ost und West, Kosmische und Menschliche Geschichte, Band VI (Central Europe Between East and West. Cosmic and Human History Volume VI, which is GA 174a of Steiner’s Gesamtausgabe, or Collected Works).

The first four lectures were given on four separate visits, two in late 1914 and two in the spring and autumn of 1915. During this period Steiner gave many lectures about the Folk Souls and Folk Spirits of the European peoples in relation to Christ and also about experiences on crossing the threshold of death.3 The next two lectures are from a visit in March 1916, in the first of which Steiner addresses recent criticism of himself by Annie Besant, president of the Theosophical Society. The immediate background to this is the separation of Steiner’s pupils from the Theosophical Society in 1912-1913 and the founding of the Anthroposophical Society in 1913. The deeper background lies in the aims of Western occult groups and the differences between the East, West and Central European approaches to spirituality, all of which are discussed in the lectures in this book.

The two lectures from March 1916 are followed by two lectures from a visit to Munich in May 1917. In these, Steiner took up certain problems that had recently been emerging in the Anthroposophical Society, and also spoke about the principle of humanity’s ‘decreasing age’ in contrast with the increasing age of human individuals. This was something he had researched the previous winter. He also addressed the threefold nature of the human being and the Eighth Council of Constantinople in the year 869. The last four lectures were given in 1918, two in February and two in May. Amongst other things, the February lectures address communication with the dead, a subject on the hearts of countless bereaved family members who had lost loved ones in the war, and also the struggle between the Archangel Michael and his spiritual opponent Ahriman since the 1840s. The final pair of lectures, from May 1918, deal with growing opposition to anthroposophy, with the effects of the Folk Spirits, and with certain growing contemporary phenomena: bigotry in thinking, a mean-spirited pedantry in feeling, and clumsy ineptitude in willing, and how to overcome them.

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From August 1914 Germany was fighting on two fronts, against Britain and France in the West and against Russia in the East. The well-equipped Russian armies invaded German East Prussia on 17 August, some two weeks before the main German armies in the West entered northern France from Belgium. The day before the first lecture in this book, the German strategy for the invasion of France had failed at the Battle of the Marne (5-12 Sept.). Later that autumn, mobile warfare in the West would cease and a fixed system of trenches would stretch from the Channel to Switzerland. This remained basically static, despite massive assaults to breach it by both sides, until the summer of 1918 when, after the German Spring Offensive had failed, a war of mobility finally resumed, and the Allies, reinforced now by large numbers of American troops, began to push the Germans back towards their own borders. For four long years, Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary—which was itself engaged against Russia in the East and against Serbia and Italy in the South—faced enemies all around them (except Scandinavia), a strategic situation of encirclement that had resulted from carefully constructed Anglo-French-Russian diplomacy over the period 1887-1907 as well as by the Germans’ own errors.

Looking at Europe’s spiritual crisis in the war from his vantage point in German-speaking Central Europe (Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland), Rudolf Steiner saw that the Western Powers of Britain and France were actually led from behind the scenes of their much-vaunted ‘democracies’ by the ancient, desiccated forces of Freemasonry—much stronger then than they are today—while to the East, Russia was guided by the semi-mystical rituals of the even more ancient forces of Orthodox monarchy and religion, which reached back to Byzantium and the late Roman Empire. Steiner himself had sought to unite the achievements of modern natural science with a new, esoteric Christian understanding that was not Protestant, Roman Catholic or Orthodox. He recognized that our modern age—which began in the fifteenth century and has the task of developing what he called the Consciousness Soul (and sometimes the Spiritual Soul), the individual understanding of oneself as a spiritual being in this material world—is led in a sense by the economic motivations of the English-speaking peoples of northwest Europe and their North American offshoot, just as the previous epoch had been led by the political motivations of the peoples of southern Europe, the Greeks and the Romans.

In our current epoch, which will last until the mid-fourth millennium, the leadership by the English-speaking peoples will in its first part be of an external and material nature. But the role of the English-speaking peoples in natural science, politics and economic life needs to be complemented by what Central Europe can contribute in the cultural and spiritual sphere. This is where Steiner saw...