Handwork and Handicrafts - Waldorf Research Institute

Although it was already prepared in Greece, it was not until the close of antiquity,
after its gradual development in Roman times, that this garment took on the expressive form
in which we see it in the early Christian era. World-historical events are always reflected
in the artistic creations of mankind. In art and in the crafts, and, as we have seen above,
in clothing too, the inner and outer experience of the human being reveals itself. So one
feels impelled to ask: What was taking place in history at the time when the old Roman
garment was superseded by a new one? It was at the time of the first Roman Emperor that
Christianity entered into world history.
Through the spiritual nature of Christianity, a special lighting-up of consciousness
was able to take place in mankind through the course of the centuries. The significance of
this change as reflected in the development of philosophy has been described by Steiner in his
book Riddles of Philosophy, as well as in many other books and lectures. Through Christianity
souls were acquiring the capacity to win back in freedom and independence, and with everincreasing
clarity of consciousness, the connection with the spiritual world which they had
lost as the Mysteries which had once guided them fell into decline. To the human being was
given the possibility of a new experience of the “I.” It is the Christ who gives the impulse
enabling all men—each as a separate individual—to experience the “I am.” 20 All that went
before was a preparation for this development of consciousness of selfhood, of the “I am.”
This development is reflected in many different ways in Christian art. Feelings,
sensations and thoughts can find their outer expression in color. Can we not feel a simple
vertical line, by contrast with a curved or horizontal one, to be an expression of the force of
uprightness in the human being? Does not such a line connect the human being with the
heights of the Cosmos?
If we learn to cultivate an inner experience of the dynamics of lines and forms, a
deeper understanding of them awakens in us. And then it should be possible for us to gain
an insight into the remarkable occurrence of the vertical ornamental line of the garments of
the early Christian era. The claves would seem to be a confirmation of the profound inner
experience that souls were undergoing with a greater or lesser degree of consciousness. Here
one can feel how the human garment has been given an artistic form which speaks of the
experience of standing firmly on the earth and, at the same time, of looking upwards to a
divine world. Thus the new age created for itself a new form, even to the style of dress.
It is worth noting in this connection that Roman civilization did not transform its
old garment, the toga, on its entry into the new era, but rather, at the moment of reception
of the Christian Ego-impulse, replaced the Etruscan, that is to say the Eastern, Asiatic toga,
with the dalmatica, which came from an old European people, the Illyrians. The Dalmatians
were descendants of the Illyrians, an old European, not an Asiatic, people. Dalmatia was a
part of Illyria.
It will very often be found that what the divine worlds wish to accomplish in their
guidance of mankind is reflected in early works of art, and that these, by foreshadowing what
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