Heart Thoughts from the Christmas Conference

John Beck

Anthroposophy has the most impactful, fundamental, productive ideas in the world today. Cosmic in scope, intimate in quality, rooted in the depths of existence, they integrate themselves livingly into individual human consciousness to transform culture and guide evolution.

Do we understand this thing “culture,” this bi-directional placenta which connects individual humans with humanity? Steiner’s own initiative—beyond education, health, healing the earth, elevating the arts—was toward a healthy global human civilization. For these ideas he could only take personal responsibility, since no one else—not even Marie Steiner or Ita Wegman—could embrace them comprehensively.

He provided at the Christmas Conference “Statutes” based in reality. In describing the Society he placed before the members no future goals which they, as the Society, were not already taking up. The weight of the biggest initiative he would carry—which again reflected the reality. He expected to have another twelve years, a Jupiter cycle, to live.

Finding members not up to the immediate tasks, he added no guidance in the fifteen months left him. He poured himself out for nine months, then lay at the foot of his great sculptural group, continuing to follow the Christ path in what looked so much like a long crucifixion. its friends had not been vigilant enough. Then the divide between younger friends, oriented to action in the world, and older ones engrossed in study, had brought Steiner later in 1923 to form a “free” society for “the youth.”

In the Anthroposophical Society today we celebrate the Christmas Conference as if an immutable guidance. It is simplest to rely on the stenographed words (I give some page numbers for The Christmas Conference 1 in this text), and on the “Statutes.” This fixed reliance, this literalism, may be a profound mistake. Celebrate this great event solemnly, reverently, and in awareness of the reality of 1923.

What did that look like, the context of this Christmas Conference? In many ways the event was born out of failure. We need find no pessimism or despair in that. Failures belong to the first half of the “mystery of dying and becoming”; they ask us to die to illusions, rebirthing enthusiasm out of clearer sight.

Dr. Steiner himself spelled out the context: “I have no hesitation in saying that the outer shelter for our gathering resembles nothing more than a shack erected amongst the ruins, a poor, a terribly poor shack of a home” (p. 45). The magnificent Goetheanum had burnt down at the beginning of the year; the arson was called for publicly, but 1 Anthroposophic Press, 1990.

Five years out from the Great War, the political, economic, and moral situation was terrible. Soviet Russia was closing to anthroposophy. Steiner’s birthplace, the great tri-cultural state of Austria-Hungary, had been dismembered. His campaign for a new approach to statecraft (literally, the “three-membering of the social organism”) had failed. In Germany, armed gangs of the far left clashed with far right militias. There were huge numbers of discharged, unemployed soldiers, and the maimed survivors in every city and town.

The idea took hold of Germany betrayed, “a stab in the back,” with Steiner among those blamed (for his friendship with Germany’s initial war leader Helmuth von Moltke). Resentments were paving a path for Adolf Hitler. France had occupied parts of Germany with West African troops, and with Belgium in 1923 seized the industrial Ruhr Valley, wreaking havoc with the young Weimar Republic. From early 1922 to late 1923 the exchange rate for German marks to buy one US dollar went from 160 into the high billions.

Rudolf Steiner asked that realities be embraced. “It is essential for us to stand firmly on a foundation of reality; that is, on the foundation of present-day consciousness” (p. 53). A “fundamental problem” to be solved “in our hearts” would be “that our Society, before all others, will be given the task of combining the greatest conceivable openness with true and genuine esotericism” (p. 99). Esotericism is usually seen as height and depth. How do we imagine “openness”? As infinite breadth, as radiant receptiveness? A problem for hearts.

Similarly he observed, “At the present moment of the Society’s development, it is important that we make our arrangements on the basis of reality and not [on the basis] of principles. There is, is there not, a difference between the two” (p. 114).

Because they call on the heart, these parts of what Steiner asked of the Christmas Meeting are easily overlooked.

To be both broadly open, and deeply esoteric.

And to be real.

John Beck ( jhbeck23@gmail.com) served as director of communications for the Anthroposophical Society in America from 2009 to 2023. Earlier he was general manager of the New York Open Center, president of the NYC Branch of the ASA, and in charge of WNYC radio/tv and WGBH Radio Boston.