True Piety

 

Rudolf Steiner, January 6, 1924:

I should like to give you a brief description of a type of man who might be met with from the fifteenth century onwards through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. You might find him in some country village as a herb-gatherer for an apothecary, or in some other simple calling. If one takes an interest in special forms and manifestations of the being of man as they show themselves in this or that individuality, then one may meet and recognize such a person. At first he is extraordinarily reserved, speaks but little, perhaps even turns away your attention from what you are trying to find in him by talking in a trivial manner, on purpose to make you think it is not worthwhile to converse with him. If, however, you know better than to look merely at the content of the words a man says, if you know how to hear the ring of the words, how to listen to the way the words come out of a man, then you will go on listening to such a one, despite all discouragement. And if out of some karmic connection he receives the impression that he really should speak to you, then he will begin to speak, carefully and guardedly. And you will make the discovery that he is a kind of wise man. But what he says is not earthly wisdom. Neither is there contained in it much of what we now call spiritual science. But they are warm words of the heart, far-reaching moral teachings; nor is there anything sentimental about his way of uttering them; he speaks them rather as proverbs.

He might say something like this. “Let us go over to yonder fir-tree. My soul can creep into the needles and cones, for my soul is everywhere. From the cones and needles of the fir-tree, my soul sees through them, looks out into the deeps and distances of the worlds beyond; and then I become one with the whole world. That is the true piety, to become one with the whole world. Where is God? God is in every fir-cone. And he who does not recognize God in every fir-cone, he who sees God somewhere else than in every fir-cone — he does not know the true God.”

I want only to describe to you how these men spoke, men that you might find in the way I have described. Such was their manner of speaking. And they might go on to say more. “Yes, and when one creeps into the fir-cones and into the needles of the fir-tree, then one finds how the God rejoices over the human beings in the world. And when one descends deep down into one's own heart, into the abysses of the innermost of man's nature, there also one finds the God; but then one learns to know how He is made sad through the sinfulness of men.”

In such wise spoke these simple sages. A great number of them possessed — to speak in modern language — “editions” of the geometrical figures of the old Rosicrucians. These they would show to those who approached them in the right way. When, however, they spoke about these figures — which were no more than quite simple, even poor, impressions — then the conversation would unfold in a strange manner. There were many people who, although they took interest in the unpretentious wise man before them, were at the same time overcome with curiosity as to what these strange Rosicrucian pictures really meant, and asked about them. But they received from these wise men, who were often regarded as eccentric, no clear and exact answer; they received only the advice: If one attains the right deepening of soul, then one can see through these figures, as through a window, into the spiritual world. The wise men would give as it were a description of what they themselves had been able to feel and experience from the figures rather than any explanation or interpretation of them. And often it was so, that when one had heard these expressions of feeling in connection with the figures, one could not put them into thought at all; for these simple sages did not give thoughts. What they gave, however, had an after-working that was of immense significance. One left these men not only with warmth in one's soul but with the feeling: I have received a knowledge that lives in me, a knowledge I can by no means enclose in thoughts and concepts.

That was one of the ways in which, during this period from the fourteenth, fifteenth, to the end of the eighteenth century, the nature of the Divine and the nature of the Human, what God is and what Man is, was taught and made known to man through feeling. We cannot quite say: without words; but we can say: without ideas — although not on that account without content.

In this period much intercourse went on among men by means of a silencing of thought. No one can arrive at a true conception of the character of this period who does not know how much was brought to pass in those days through this silencing of thought, when men interchanged not mere words but their very souls.

Source: January 6, 1924