Considera

CARBON, LIMESTONE AND PLANT LIFE

George Adams

Nature and the life of Man are one in origin. Penetrate deeply enough into their inner essence, and every entity or substance will prove related to the evolutionary secrets of the human soul and the Divine Beings. So long as knowledge is darkened with materialism the diversity of substances presents insoluble riddles. Experimental and intellectual research, for all the wonder of its discoveries, only makes more elaborate the pattern of the labyrinth; it multiplies the questions but does not find the answers.

Soon after his return from one of his longest stays in this country, in October, 1923, Rudolf Steiner gave the five memorable lectures on the great spiritual pictures or Imaginations in which the life of Nature-the Earth-planet as a whole in relation to the Cosmos reveals the secrets of the four seasons and seasonal festivals. The picture for Easter-time throws a deep light on agricultural science, and above all on what is said of Carbon as the master-builder of living forms in Nature, in the third lecture of the course, given at Koberwitz in the ensuing summer.

The central theme is the great sculptured group which was to have stood at the eastern end of the first Goetheanum building It is the figure of Christ as representative of the true human pathway. holding the balance between the opposing forces of cosmic evolution past and future, known as the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers Christ is here shown as the bearer of the powers of healing powers which in their turn are connected with all that nourishes and sustains human life on Earth, since all nourishment involves a process of healing, a renewal of the inner fount of life, an overcoming of the ravages of time. Rudolf Steiner spoke of a mystery play which should one day be enacted against the background of the sculptured group. Archangel Raphael Christian equivalent of Mercury the God of Healing-should appear, instructing Man in the secrets of healing and the medicinal forces of Nature.

These spiritual pictures were derived however not from traditional religious sources or from reflections on the soul and the subjective life of man. They sprang from insight into what is going on, season by season, in surrounding Nature, the life of the planet Earth around us. For Easter it is the balance of living Carbon in its relation to the rocky substrata of the soil and to the ether-spheres encompassing the Earth, which Rudolf Steiner pictures-experienced by spiritual vision with the approaching springtime.

In the third lecture of the Agriculture Course the same theme is touched upon in another context. Carbon, says Dr. Steiner, bears the creative and formative process in Nature. Seen in the light of his earlier teaching about the cosmic Christ, it is significant how he here speaks of the Ego-principle in the great Universe. Building with Carbon the true Philosopher's Stone the universal Spirit creates and ever re-creates the forms. In bygone epochs when earth was not yet mineralised as it now is, carbon was more alone and umimpaired in this form-building process. But now the rocky nature of the Earth is there beneath it, above all with its limestone content. Limestone is full of craving: it tends to draw into itself what the plant-life has need of "All that the limestone desires to have, lives in plant nature. Time and again this must be wrested away from it." In the present epoch it is with the help of silicon that carbon overcomes the limestone forces and builds the forms of plants on which all other earthly life depends. Now Dr. Steiner places silica and limestone side by side with the great polarity known to us in our own nature, also in animal nature around us, namely the sensory, perceptive, cognitive aspect of our life upon the one hand, the volitional and craving nature on the other. It is a rather startling instance of what we have to learn if we are ever to overcome materialism and that means relative ignorance in our outlook upon Nature. Here are applied, to what we have regarded as mere matter, such categories of the inner life as "sense" and "craving" We have indeed to find the spirit, of which the "matter" is but the outward manifestation. It is the elemental spirituality of Earth-nature the hosts of elemental beings, their in-and-out breathing with the seasons into which the seer enters with his enlarged, cosmic power of compassion. Yet he does not merely impart what he sees, for us to take or leave." He gives us an ideal key, wherewith to lift our contemplation into the realm where these things are true. There is a midway realm between the merely spatial treatment, which predominates in entend the most inward aspect of the soul and spirit life in Nature. This midway realm Time. We have to train ourselves to an experience of time to read It not only from spatial clocks and dials but to go on from space into the life of time itself. Hence Dr. Steiner encouraged us to meditate on the metamorphosis of plants; hence too be gave the fifty-two weekly verses of the Soul's Calendar and the many lectures on the seasons, including the all-important Whitsun lecture on Space and Time and Soul-life in the Cosmos, given at Dornach on the eve of his departure for the Agriculture Course.

I think the key to what is said of sense and craving in relation to silica and limestone lies in what Dr. Steiner calls spiritual Chronology in the old Zarathustrian meaning of the term. He indicates it in Christ and the Spiritual World, and in his lectures on Genesis where he explains the recurring phrase: the evening and the morning were the first Day, the second Day, and so on. The course of time in not mere smooth indifferent flow as in Newton's definition. It is the beat of many interweaving waves, wherein is suffering and strain, evolutionary discord, anxious tension as well as resolution and release and healing. Darkness and light, even the final condensation of darkness into heavy matter, are born of the contrasting Aeons, Beings of Time who bear the past tenaciously into the present, also those Beings who hasten prematurely into the future or who distort the patient expectation of the future into frozen fear. Such is the Zarathustrian polarity of light and darkness Ormuzd and Ahriman - which permeated Dr. Steiner's explanation of the Gospels and indeed all his Spiritual Science.

The educational and human-scientific teaching of his later years related this polarity of time to human Thought and Will and to the counterpart of these in the great Universe. Though "sense" and "craving" are not identifiable with Thought and Will, yet they are obviously akin to them; thus in our human world sensation provides data, the subject matter of Thought, and craving as it were the raw material which in its higher aspect becomes the life of Will. I cannot here enlarge upon this theme, but recommend to student at Dermating upon Light and Darkness, Thought and Will, d at Dornach in December, 1920, and in the English edition published in the book entitled Colour.

It is therefore the spiritual tension between past and future which in his expression in this terrestrial polarity een pasted and cra ver The silica which in some way lightens the Earth is like the worlopen eye through which the soul of teach looks out into the made of stars and beholds creative pictures by which all things we renewen the Beginning, by which all living things are ever and ass other after their kind and archeting thinge limestone on darkened, outwardly white thoughty pay the akin to the dark essence of matter white though it may be, is the tragedy and conflict, yet also the germ of a cosmic future to be fulfilled in the long course of evolution. In silica and limestone, as in human Thought and Will, we have an aspect of the interplay of light and darkness, the great principles of the cosmic drama referred to in the opening chapters of Genesis.

That the limestone nature of the Earth lays claim to what is most essential for the maintenance of life upon our planet, is known and plays no little part in the external science of today. Life is main- tained by the plant's activity, assimilating carbon from the carbon dioxide (carbonic acid gas) of the air, building its carbohydrate body by means of carbon and water and at the same time breathing forth life-bearing oxygen. Limestone and other alkaline elements within the Earth crave for this same carbon dioxide. The Russian scientist Vernadsky in his fascinating work on Geo-Chemistry unfolds a mighty picture of how the carbon balance is preserved. He esti mates the resources of carbonic acid gas, needed for plant life from year to year; also to what extent the mineral forces of the Earth- those above all of limestone-withdraw the carbonic acid from the air and water and lock it up in stone. Though much of this is conjectural, it is at least founded on fact. Based on the widest possible range of researches, chemical, geological and biological, Vernadsky's work is infused with an imaginative outlook, very wel- come if it be the token of a change of heart in Science.

The details of this Geo-Chemistry, and of the more specialised soil-science of our time (wherein much pioneering work seems, incidentally, to have been likewise due to the Russian school), can be of great interest to us from our point of view, If, to begin with, we take the typical minerals, such as the felspars and micas, which- all together constitute by far the greater part of the Earth's crust, we find them characterised by a threefold structure. They are, in fact, broadly speaking, alkaline alumino-silicates, the word " alkali" in this connection being taken to include both the alkaline earths- limestone and magnesia and the more soluble alkalis soda and potash. In this threefold structure the alkali or alkaline earth represents of course the basic part, the silica the acid. Alumina, which in another phase of its existence becomes the fundamental principle of clay, here plays a mediating part. It is in chemical language" amphoteric functioning, that is to say, according to conditions, either as acid or alkali. Thus with strong acid it will act as base and with strong alkalis as acid. (We may not scour our aluminium saucepans with soda, for the strong alkali attacks them just as an acid will attack metals)

In the threefold structure of the minerals the aluminium oxide is allied, on the whole, rather more closely to the silica than to the alkaline portion. Very significant from this point of view is Dr. Steiner's saying. Having described silica as the "universal sense" and limestone or its kindred as the universal craving" in Earth Nature, he goes on to say: "Clay mediates between the two stands rather nearer to the silicious nature, but mediates towards the limestone." Precisely this, the mineralogical structure of the rocks as well as their contribution to the living soil upon disintegration tends to show. The mediating part played by alumina, even by clay as such is, I believe, closely connected with the metallic quality of the element which underlies it. In many of these minerals iron or other typical metals-iron of course above all can in varying amounts replace the aluminium, so that we get ferro-silicates instead. This aliquot replacement of aluminium by iron points to the cosmic function of the former, though aluminium as such is an ignoble and rather empty metal, without specific planetary virtues such as pertain to iron, silver, tin or copper. The mediating in the language of Spiritual Science, "mercurial" property belongs to the metallic nature. Such is the function of clay between the silica and limestone. One gains, I think, a truer aspect of the chemistry and mineralogy of metals if one assigns to them this amphoteric, mediating role in the polarity of base and acid instead of classing them onesidedly and sometimes contrary to fact-among the basic elements. (There are transitions, as indeed rigid classification seldom does justice to Nature. To some extent, what is here said of alumina also applies to magnesia, which from the alkaline-earthy side tends also to the metallic nature).

Now when these rocky constituents begin to disintegrate in the soil and subsoil, the limestone or other alkaline factor becomes separated from the more complex alumino-silicate radical. Life and decaying life play a significant part in this disintegration; as Science recognises, it is not always a purely mineral process. Carbonic and other organic acids deriving from the sphere of life assist in decom- posing the fine particles and flakes of rocky matter. And in return, once liberated from the silica that held it, limestone makes felt its power of absorbing carbonic acid from the waters of the soil. Not only therefore in predominantly limestone districts but everywhere this process is at work. Limestone competes with the life of plants for the available carbonic acid in the air and waters of the Earth. According to Vernadsky, as a result of the weathering of felspars and other alumino-silicious minerals, vast quantities of carbon dioxide-largely in the form of carbonate and bicarbonate of lime- stone-are carried downward to the sea year by year. Much of this carbon is then locked up in purely mineral deposits and for long ages or even permanently lost to the quick, ever-renewing cycles of plant life. Nor is this deposition, generally a mere inorganic process. It is through animals that the carbonate of lime, in the form of shells and other hardened casts, is at long last withdrawn from the sphere of life. Very significantly from our point of view, attention is drawn to the part played by nitrogen in this organic depositing of limestone. By nitrogen and the life of animals - bearers of astral forces carbon is drawn downward into the mineral domain, into the clutches" of the limestone.

We gain a vivid picture of how the craving nature of the lime- stone is at work. A wonderfully subtle balance must be there, determining how the carbonic acid is drawn up into the sphere of life and down again into the limestone-nature of the Earth. Physical chemistry and biology of today do indeed recognise and by refined concepts as well as experimental devices try to do justice to this sensitive play of forces. We think no longer of the crude and violent reactions, the downright affinities of a more primitive chemistry, We try to grasp the subtle play of forces thermo- dynamical, electro-chemical, expressed in the pH. We find the -buffering" effects toning down the sharp polarity of base and acid, adapting it to the more delicate needs of living things. We think of the osmotic forces, surface tensions and absorptions, colloidal solutions and suspensions, also the finest crystallographical factors in the silicious" micelles." Add to all this the untold complexity of bacterial and other microscopic life, the soil science of today energes with a host of unanswered questions. Truth is, when we have followed life and matter to these extremes of minuteness, we approach a realm where macrocosmic factors come ever more into play, where we must go for further insight, metaphorically speaking, through the zero-point of space into quite other dimensions and into that of Time above all. The findings of external Science such as are cited above are indeed often important rather as symp- toms of the truth than as direct explanations. We cannot with mere chemistry explain how all these elements and substances silica, limestone and potash, phosphorus, magnesia and so on work in the soil when it comes to life, or find their way into the living plant.

To find then how the limestone really works we have to cross into another realm, where, to begin with, our restless intellect is put to silence and without going off into dreams or fancies we learn to hearken to the life of Nature. There comes the infinitely subtler realm of which Rudolf Steiner speaks when he says: Winter lime- stone is not the same as summer limestone, for with approaching springtime (I quote again from the Raphael Imagination lecture) the growing plants withdraw from the Earth's limestone some of the water and carbonic acid, of which the limestone then feels emptiness and want. Now then the limestone becomes quick with craving. whereas in winter it is more quiet, more in a state of satiety. These seasonal changes in the limestone will, I imagine, be far beyond present-day chemical measurement or detection: yet what is known to science does at least suggest them, leads up to an understanding of them. Then Dr. Steiner guides our imagination outward into the heights, into the realm of the upper atmosphere and the ethereal envelope of our planet. He shows how the assimilatory life of plants and withal the life of mankind on Earth is for ever posed between two opposite dangers: that on the one hand of becoming fettered to the Earth; that on the other of withdrawal and removal from Earth-life by a kind of suffocation of the carbon-oxygen breathing process.

What is here said, once more, does not gainsay our scientific knowledge; what it does rather is to lift even the little knowledge we possess by dint of outer Science into a realm of inner meaning. One may read Vernadsky or other scientists about the carbon- oxygen balance in the biosphere of the planet Earth. All this is changed into a far more significant picture by the "Raphael Imag- ination." Here, we divine, not in atomic spatial forms of explana- tion-lies the essential being of the great processes of planetary life which with our microscopes, chemical balances and potentiometers we have now traced to the minutest limits of spatial form. We have to seek the spiritual being that finds expression in carbonic acid, in silica, in limestone, in chlorophyll, and in the sunlight that calls forth the life. One way into this realm of being is to enter medita- tively into the life of the seasons. So then we live towards the time when the festivals will once again be able to be experienced in daily work and communion with Nature, not only by conventional or piously upheld tradition.