Founding the Bridge

The Participatory Path of New Life

Michael Givens

The human soul seeks the spirit in remembering what was, sensing what is, and beholding what is to come: In this threefold inner activity, in communion with the cosmic spirit, the soul awakens.

Rudolf Steiner prepared the hearts of those around him one hundred years ago—and any listening hearts today—for the new participatory path to the spirit, made openly available by the Christmas Foundation in 1923–24.1 He demonstrated, leading up to his founding deed, that in the past, human beings sought the spirit in the cosmos as a path of remembrance: through rhythmic memory in our wanderings upon the earth; through temporal memory in the temples; and through thinking memory in the founding of academies. Then, this path became merely tradition, left to us as a semblance of cosmic memories, stimulated by the forms of logic and philosophy of the West, or the deeper knowledge of nature found in the East.

The participatory path was forged by the Son of Man, the “Nathan Soul,” who had been held back in the spiritual world and who remembered, sensed, and beheld the suffering of humanity.2 Due to his three “pre-earthly” deeds of sacrificial prayer to the Son of God for the healing spirit, we can now stand in remembrance of, sense in listening and speaking, and behold at the threshold of thinking, the human ‘I’ within, united and bestowed with God’s light for free willing.

The ‘I’ finds itself through sensing into awareness of the ‘I’ of the other through the veil of materialized physicality. There the ‘I’ finds its karma, in remembrance, in sensing-awareness, and in beholding the spirit.

At the Turning Point of Time, the Son of Man, uniting completely with the Son of God and becoming truly human, died and overcame death. He glorified (by becoming the glory of) the Father, who is life, the living foundation of karma and reincarnation, within the veil of death. He became the one remaining way—the participatory path—through which the healing spirit seeks us in our striving to consciously seek the Mystery of Golgotha; and thus, He became the Lord of Karma.3

1 Rudolf Steiner, World History and the Mysteries in the Light of Anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2021), GA 233, nine lectures given in Dornach, Dec. 24, 1923–Jan. 1, 1924.

2 Rudolf Steiner, “The Pre-Earthly Deeds of Christ”: lecture seven in the series Approaching the Mystery of Golgotha (SteinerBooks, 2006), GA 152, given in Pforzheim on March 7, 1914.

The first and greatest commandment, re-sanctified by the life and word of Jesus and by the Mystery of Golgotha, is to love the Father with all of one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength. To love the Father is to love the cross we each bear with our full spiritual-bodily incarnation into the veiled and confused sense-perceptible world, in community.

The human ‘I’, through the ego-organization and each soul-spiritual sheath, seeks the spirit right down into the physical where it finds that which unites it with the whole cosmos. The healing spirit floods into our active warmth-enthusiasm for it like the umbilical blood of our mother, and we are truly healthy, truly nourished.

Our darkened physical body bears our karma, presents the world (the other) to us, and holds within it the seed of our future, if we seek it. In freedom, we can take up our cross by following the one new commandment of Christ: To love one another amidst evil.

The gods’ ancient jealousy of our ability to do this is confounded now by the jealousy of human beings who seek to glorify themselves upon the persecution of God, nature, and humanity through fear, blame, manipulation, and condemnation.

Many people today believe they are in a great battle against human bodily illness, suffering, and death; yet they are being led by the blaming Accuser and those seeking to drive the soul and spirit completely from the body for their own egotistical aims.4 They are seeking to make rapid advances in science and medicine by communing with the adversaries to glorify the veil, and not the Father. This is to seek to sever the ‘I’ from human karma and thereby to (in reality) prevent the healing of sickness, which only occurs in free participation with the healing spirit—they are seeking to form humanity into the image and likeness of an animalized species with a mechanized, eternally-bound spirit.

We are forgetting our first love, the love of God, when we glorify the animal-machine through genetic, endocrine, psycho-neural-immunological, and ideological (word) manipulation of human health and development, and by lifting up the artifice of technology to be our savior.

Rudolf Steiner, after months (and years) of arduous preparatory work, laid within human hearts—then and now—a living, glorified bridge to the participatory path, forged from out of the ashes of the Goetheanum in the image and likeness of Golgotha.

At the conclusion of his founding deed, he confirmed that “it was so good to hear Dr. Zeylmans . . . say that it is no longer possible to build bridges from ordinary science to what is to be founded here in Dornach.”5 For Rudolf Steiner was on the verge of presenting to the world “a system of medicine [needed by mankind] based entirely on anthroposophy.”6 This also was his intention for all fields of anthroposophical work: Not that a bridge be founded from ordinary science to anthroposophy; rather, Rudolf Steiner was seeking to found a “central point for spiritual knowledge.” This certainly was to include and to extend—i.e., to complete—ordinary science, for spiritual knowledge seeks the truth; yet this did not mean that anthroposophy should “extend” from ordinary science. This seems to be a problematic misunderstanding in our time.

“The important thing is that a branch of practical life, such as medicine, should be taken up into anthroposophical life”;7 that is to say, the path for anthroposophy opened by the Christmas Conference is not leading from ordinary science, nor it is seeking to prove its efficacy or validity, or to gain interest and approval by the weight and measure of ordinary science—in the sense of first showing people “how the medicines work in practice so that they see that they are proper medicines, and will buy them; then, if they later hear that anthroposophy is behind the medicines, they will also approach anthroposophy.”8

As Rudolf Steiner made clear at the beginning of the Christmas Conference:

5 Rudolf Steiner, “On the Right Entry into the Spiritual World: The Responsibility Incumbent on Us,” lecture and words of farewell given at the end of the Christmas Conference in Dornach, on the evening of January 1, 1924. In: The Christmas Conference (Anthroposophic Press, 1990), GA 260, p. 267.

6 Ibid., lecture of January 1, 1924.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

Now a third example: A realm in which anthroposophy can be especially fruitful is that of medicine. Yet anthroposophy will quite definitely remain unfruitful in the realm of medicine, especially therapy, if the tendency persists to represent matters within the field of medicine in the Anthroposophical Movement in a manner which meets with the approval of those who represent medicine in the ordinary way today. We must carry anthroposophy courageously into every realm, including medicine. Only then will we make progress in what eurythmy ought to be, in what recitation and declamation ought to be, in what medicine ought to be, not to mention many other different fields living within our Anthroposophical Society, just as we must make progress with anthroposophy itself in the strict sense of the term.9

For, as he emphasized at the end of the conference, “not until we have the courage to regard such a method as dishonest, not until we detest such a method will anthroposophy find its way through the world.”10 The bridge that was to be founded is between human striving and the healing spirit, entirely from out of the spiritual life, so that anthroposophical work remains “within the bosom of anthroposophy.”11

Rudolf Steiner founded such a bridge with the call to “fight for the truth, not fanatically, but simply in an honest, straightforward love of the truth,”12 as a “festival of consecration . . . for the beginning of a new Turning Point of Time to which we want to devote ourselves in enthusiastic cultivation of the life of spirit”13 . . . “in order to do work in the world that is strong in healing.”14

We can participate in this festival, “that Good may become what we, from our (warm) hearts found, what we, from our (enlightened) heads direct, with conscious will”15 to heal the sickness of sin, in communion with the spirit of God.

May we seek it courageously.

Michael Givens is a practicing acupuncturist and classical Chinese herbalist, teacher, writer, and scholar (of classical Chinese medicine). He and his wife, Dr. Ali Givens, ND are working out of anthroposophy, with Waldorf community-based homeschooling, and through their medical clinic in Happy Valley, Oregon.

9 The Christmas Conference, December 24, 1923, 11:15am, p. 56f.

10 Ibid., January 1, 1924, p. 268.

11 Ibid., p. 267.

12 Ibid., p. 268.

13 Ibid., p. 270.

14 Ibid., p. 273.

15 Ibid., p. 272.