Research & Reviews Excerpt from a new translation of Rudolf Steiner’s Leading Thoughts

By Peter Selg

I n his texts published under the title Letters to the Members – contained in the Collected Works as part of volume 260a but also gathered in a special offprint after the Christmas Conference (in English: The Life, Nature, and Cultivation of Anthroposophy) – Steiner repeatedly emphasized the importance of striving for the spiritual core of anthroposophy in order to enable the reorientation of the Anthroposophical Society. If it is the task of the Anthroposophical Society to make modern spiritual science accessible to “searching souls,” then it is of the highest priority that this Society must “itself, as a Society, find its true relationship to anthroposophy.” After more than two decades of Steiner’s work for an intensive and effective social organism, this was still not the case. The Christmas Conference and the re-founding of the Society associated with it were intended to bring about the turning point. The new Society was to make anthroposophy “alive” within itself – and make the life of anthroposophy accessible to the souls seeking it, thereby countering the risk of becoming “habituated” to the existence of anthroposophy. A new awakening to the spirituality of anthroposophical spiritual science and its world-historical task was needed; in March 1924, Rudolf Steiner said, in an almost personal turn:

I would like to say that several stones would fall from my heart if I could gain the certainty that a sufficiently large number of members are aware of how important anthroposophy is today in the general spiritual-cultural process – and if this awareness would only exist to the same degree of intensity in the good sense, in the approving sense, as it exists among the opponents in the anti-sense, let us say. That is really something that would be urgently desirable .

However, this “awareness” of the importance of anthroposophy was necessarily linked to knowledge of its content, to understanding and internalizing it. The “esoteric impulse” of the Christmas Conference consisted not only in mantras, but in a new or different way of dealing with anthroposophy and its content – not in the sense of learned knowledge, but rather existentially, involving the heart, the organ of the

“Foundation Stone” and the “true self.” Esotericism depends on […] deepening in the communication of truths; in this deepening, one should see something of the impulse that the Christmas Conference wanted to bring into the Anthroposophical Society. Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner emphasized in his essays, was not only founded as a spiritual-scientific system of knowledge , but was intended from the beginning to be a thing of life in many human hearts. Anthroposophy contained life within it, “life flowing from the spirit”; its “fundamental character” is “life.” It appeared “among human beings” in the “basic form” of the “idea” – “and the first door at which it knocks is that of insight.” But its own life must always be kindled anew from and in it – i.e., it must arise anew in the individual and in the community through engagement with the content of spiritual science. Anthroposophy is not, in its nature, “of the library shelf” – and the books dealing with it must “come to life in the human being as he reads.”

After the Christmas Conference, Rudolf Steiner spoke of the distortion, even the “killing” of anthroposophy through its purely intellectual reception without the involvement of the human heart, and described what was needed instead: “reverence for the spiritual life” and the “fundamental tone of human love” in dealing with anthroposophy as a living being. The human soul has a fine sensitivity in being able to perceive this tone in what is spoken; and this in the very highest degree becomes a medium of understanding. Only in this way can anthroposophy live in its Society and – radiating from this Society – live in public, for: Where such reverence is absent, there is no power in the discussion of anthroposophical truths

In January 1924, Rudolf Steiner began a lecture course in Dornach which he described as “a kind of introduction to anthroposophy itself” – and which was at the same time intended as a guide to “how one can represent anthroposophy in the world today.” He wanted to develop anthroposophy from its “foundations” and show the way in which, from now on, “the tone should be when it comes to anthroposophy.” He also made it clear once again how contemporary anthroposophy is, what intense questions live in the souls of human beings today – questions that are directed toward the essential nature of the human being and his spiritual home but without finding an answer:

I n their subconscious life, the men and women of today harbor earnest questions. They cannot even express these in clear thoughts, much less find answers in what the civilized world can offer; but these questions are there, and a large number of people feel them deeply. In fact, these questions are present today in all who really think. […] The great riddle, the anxious doubt confronts [the human being of the present]: Where is the world to which I belong? The more human civilization has advanced and people have learned to think intensively, the more anxiously have they felt this question. It is deepseated in human hearts today, and divides the civilized world into two classes. There are those who repress this question, smother it, do not bring it to clarity within themselves. But they suffer from it nevertheless, as from a terrible longing to solve this riddle of the human being. Others deaden themselves in face of this question, doping themselves with all sorts of things in outer life. But in so deadening themselves, they kill within themselves the secure feeling of their own being. Emptiness comes over their souls. This feeling of emptiness is present in the subconsciousness of countless human beings today

According to Rudolf Steiner, however, anthroposophical knowledge of the human being and the world opens up a methodical path of training and knowledge – and, on this path, opens concrete perspectives for answering the question of the true nature of the human being. Anthroposophy, “from the voice of the human heart itself,” receives its “mighty task” in the present; indeed, it is in itself “nothing other than what humanity is longing for today.” This, however, configures the task of the Anthroposophical Society: to make anthroposophy accessible in all its significance through a real life with anthroposophical spiritual science and its formation of ideas. The Anthroposophical Society [. . .] must find the way to let the hearts of human beings speak from out of their deepest longings . In January 1924, Rudolf Steiner wrote in the “Nachrichtenblatt”: We are living in a time when anthroposophy would become a burning question for countless human beings on the earth – if only the Anthroposophical Society succeeded in working in such a way that people’s real needs could “catch fire” by what is presented to them as anthroposophy.

This is an excerpt from Peter Selg’s introduction to the forthcoming bilingual edition (including revised English translation) of the Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts (GA 26), which will be published by the Verlag of the Ita Wegman Institute in Arlesheim, Switzerland.